


dark doom honey (i follow you)

by Leggies



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Armitage Hux Being An Asshole, Crack Treated Seriously, Deepthroating, Dirty Talk, Dom/sub, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Face Slapping, Face-Fucking, Fix-It of Sorts, Glove Kink, Huxdemption, Impact Play, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Kink Negotiation, Making Spy Hux Make Sense, Married Couple, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Panty Sniffing, Porn With Plot, Power Exchange, Praise Kink, Size Difference, Verbal Humiliation, but with consent, chaotic switches, mild foot stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:22:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 37,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22906183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leggies/pseuds/Leggies
Summary: Four years after the end of the war, Rose finds an old pair of First Order-issued gloves, and seeks her husband for a little favor: to meet the General once again.(aka: let's make spy Hux make sense/give Rose and Hux the ending they deserved/throw in a lil Huxdemption/watch some married people get it on)
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Rose Tico
Comments: 30
Kudos: 78





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I really love this pairing and I hope that if it's unfamiliar you might like them, and if not that you think I've captured them pretty well. I wanted to do them justice for all the lovely writers who have come before me. A special shout-out to [SecretReyloTrash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash) for cat's cradle which was a huge inspiration, and to [ShinyGreenApple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShinyGreenApple/pseuds/ShinyGreenApple) for the use of 'little rebel' and to everyone on Twitter and the Gingerflower discord who are so lovely and inspiring and encouraging. :^) 
> 
> The only thing you might find helpful to know before going in is that I'm using some of the comics as backstory inspo; Hays Minor is a totally dead planet, and Hux is from Arkanis, a super sludgy miserable rainy spot.
> 
> There are too many references to all properly link, lmao. I'm going to work on getting them up with links for explanations. I will say that I took the idea of Hays Minor being a dead world from the comics, but the rest of the culture is my own creation and isn't supposed to be an analog for any one group in particular. This fic is like half real canon references and half my own creation.
> 
> Anyway, author feeds on attention, as we all do. If you liked let me know! <3

_“How poignantly emptiness cries out / to be filled”_

_\- Henri Cole_

**—**

Rose is browsing idly through a night market junker’s stall, killing time, when she spots them. 

A pair of gloves, Order-issued. The supple shine of the black leather is unmistakable. 

They catch her eye instantly, sticking out amongst a pile of discarded First Order uniform pieces stuffed in an old steel drum. They’re selling cheap, just a few credits per pound where the rest of the booth is crowded from dirt floor to rickety canvas ceiling with individually priced, second-hand textiles. 

There’s not a huge market for nostalgia pieces, where the now Former Order is concerned. Those still stuck on the cause either burned up long ago during one of the many schisms following its dissolution, or are now so fractured apart from other sympathizers as to need to blend in, to maybe _not_ wear their regalia with pride. 

Rose has half a mind to dig around for one of those teal uniform jackets — she wore the medium size, if she remembers right, and that should have been common enough. A cursory glance through the pile reveals none, which is just as well. The thought of actually owning the cursed object makes Rose’s skin crawl, much less seeing just how much Hux will love her in it. 

She picks out the gloves instead, a much more appealing idea forming in her mind. If things go according to the plan that strikes her then, they won’t have the things around longer than a night. 

There’s nothing outwardly evil about them, except for the Order’s emblem impressed into the leather, just once, along the cuff of either glove. With a twinge of excitement she finds that they’re a size large. They might actually fit him. They’re also somehow brand new, still stitched together by a loop of easily snippable thread, despite it being four years since the fall of the Order: he won’t be able to bitch about them being secondhand and “dirty”, either. 

In her bare hands Rose finds the gloves to be unimaginably soft. They’re just as velvety as they’d looked, on first glance, when they caught the yellow glow of the junker’s one bare light bulb. She runs her thumb along the stitching on the index finger, finding it to be of shockingly high quality. 

For a mass-produced item - this pair of gloves was made for one of hundreds of thousands of Order officers - the seams are impeccably tight, the cuffs hemmed beautifully, the impressions of the logo perfectly crisp. 

If the First Order had just focused their energy on being _good_ and actually rebuilding the universe, instead of perfect uniforms and gorgeous Star Destroyers and pointless planetary conquests, they could have gotten so much _done_. The thought, and then her husband’s gloating face in her mind’s eye, irritates Rose out of her trance-like state. She stops fondling the gloves but does not follow the impulse to throw them back onto the pile, like they’ll burn her if she keeps them in her grasp. 

They lay in her hands, limp and harmless. 

She bites at her bottom lip, and casts her eyes around the rest of the stall, as if interested in purchasing a worn spacer’s undershirt or the scrap linen from the Governor’s mansion, thinking: his hands. His elegant, long-fingered, well-cared-for, much beloved, very tasty and fun to nibble on _hands,_ in these, and then on her. The thought ends there only because she forces it to. 

If Hux hears her idea and isn’t at all intrigued, which Rose can’t quite imagine happening in _any_ reality, the gloves would at least be useful. With a decently busy Rebel-aligned repair station to run, they go through gloves like water. Though not leather ones, and none nearly as nice as these. 

The linen junker is a Toydarian male, hovering with his stubby fly-like wings in a corner over a small portable holo-projector. He doesn’t look up from his drama show as she approaches. Rose recognizes what he’s watching from the distorted mirror image of the holo-player when viewed from behind, and understands his engrossed interest. It’s one of her favorites, too. The one about a rogue smuggler and a Galactic senator, a pair of enemies turned into fake lovers turned into real lovers. 

That reminds her: she needs to catch up on recent episodes, before they next see Ben and Rey and he goes and spoils the season finale for her _again_. Like the karking show isn’t another reboot of their story anyway.

She spots the “SOLID CREDIT ONLY” sign on his counter before the junker can curse her out for holding out her wrist with the digiwatch, trying to pay with her virtual account. Not uncommon among vendors in the night market, or on the planetoid Iasus in general, but nevertheless annoying, because Hux carries all of the credit chips. He’s the one who “counts them” as he’s “spending them”, after all, one of those habits of his so tightly held in that fist of personality Rose knows not to waste her energy trying to fight it. 

_She,_ on the other hand, likes to dedicate her mental space to thinking of far more important things than money. Like her garden, or Charlotte the cat, or what’s for dinner… 

There is also work. Work that consumes her life about as much as it did years ago, when she still lived in a barracks and ate nutritional loaf for breakfast. Yet now that it’s just her and Hux living low on this far-flung hideout, she feels like luck keeps drip drip dripping into her cup, every day, without stopping. In the military it was the opposite. She drained, just as quickly. 

When they’d put in a request for a permanent settlement status, this was the compromise: they would carry on with their remote mission from afar, as was always the plan, but would also lend their engineering services to Rebel pilots in need of them. It was something on the straight and narrow, where Hux could be kept under some kind of watch and they could, in turn, be afforded certain protections from enemies with rightful bones to pick. 

It seemed a fair price to pay, opening themselves up for the occasional crash landing and engine overhaul, in order to live out of a _home_ instead of a _ship._ Thus far, it has worked out in equal favor to them and the former Resistance.

Rose spends the bulk of her days in the honest trenches of her remote engineering career. Fixing starships for the allies that get themselves into trouble on the Outer Rim, and working with Hux to puzzle through the assorted projects that the new Galactic Collective needs finished by their _uniquely_ combined intellect. 

She likes to balance on the knife’s edge of her own intelligence, on her and Hux’s combined encyclopedic knowledge of the known universe’s starcraft and their assorted weaponry. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself without the daily climb from wanting to rip her husband’s limbs off of his body when he won’t relent on how to go about a repair, to the unparalleled euphoria of experimentally switching on the engines to find them, finally, blessedly, sputtering to perfect purring life. 

Now that lasting peace has rippled out, almost unexpectedly, from system to system, business has slowed to a steady stream. The Collective wields its power only a little stupidly, so things in the Galaxy improve quickly under the new government. 

Rose still lives for the emergency repairs, where she lacks half the parts necessary and needs double the time to pull off a satisfactory job; they test her, and in different ways than their other mission does. But the tranquility is nice, too, and they have time for their other hobbies.

Such as: by night, for fun, they work steadily to steal dirty industrialist money, reclaiming credits immorally hoarded and illegally gained by the slime of the galaxy. They used to go off-world much more often, blasters blazing like it was their first mission all over again, but Rose got fed up with the stress and of living out of a packed bag for months at a time. 

Both good at solving puzzles and extracting hidden information, they’ve managed to do quite a number right from their home worktable.

It’s scary how much Rose loves to do it, she thinks sometimes. They target the _wrongfully_ rich, of course, and not just wrongfully rich by Rose’s low standards of wrongful wealth; the kind of cretins who run Twi’lek trafficking rings and weapons smuggling and enslave rural moons for the mining of precious ores. 

The recovered credits go towards combating the very causes from which the money was pilfered, the trafficking rings especially; to funding academies on developing planets and researching climate restoration technologies for ruined atmospheres. All kinds of things that help facilitate healing, not perpetuate the galaxy’s predilection for conflict. 

And it’s always after they’ve gathered data. Lots of data. Enough to justify siccing one of the Collective’s newly initiated task forces, many full of Former Order soldiers, on those criminal organizations. They’re both experienced enough to know to take full advantage of the Collective’s current political will to make strides in wiping injustice out for good.

This is in addition to the hours they put in fixing vehicles or sitting at the comm-desk in the shop office, working on imported data pads or walking Collective technicians through the finer points of the First Order technology they’re either facing in skirmishes or breaking down for re-application.

But for Rose, being the burr digging into the side of the war-machine, the thing that kept the wheel of death turning in the galaxy for so long? 

It’s worth the anonymity. Leaving the Resistance base. Being strapped forever to the former architect of the destruction of planets - of entire _star-systems -_ just because she’d taken pity on the terribly injured traitor in need of a cybernetic leg and a (literal) partner in crime _._

It’s worth the effort. It’s worth _everything_. 

The Toydarian grunts an assent when Rose places the gloves on his table, and in her confident but heavily accented Huttese asks him to please keep them for her, that she’ll return shortly. She turns out from the hot, unventilated booth into the night, to the crowd of the market. 

Dozens of species intermingle in these narrow alleyways between hastily-constructed night market stalls, the natural humidity of this climate ratcheted up by the heat of frying meats and power generators and so many bodies. Bugs gather under the orange glow of street lamps, and the light catches on a surge of faces and masks and suits of shiny protective armor. 

Iasus is no true seedy Huttese underbelly, but it comes as close as its section of the Mid Rim gets. Whatever isn’t a warm ocean on this planet is land; carpeted with dense, ancient forest, the tree trunks wider around than four humans fingertip-to-fingertip can hug and exceeding 350 feet tall. Excellent hideouts and escape routes abound. Until its takeover, it focused mainly on servicing fleets headed into Hutt territory and beyond, and so naturally became a hotbed for the trading of all the Hutts’ favorite illicit goods.

Once colonized by the First Order for its strategic location and abundance of industry, Iasus was improved upon. It was given command towers overlooking its capital city and a fleet of brand-new medbays to complement them. _Now_ it’s loosely Collective-aligned (but unofficially governed by an un-warlike rabble of Hutts), a mish-mash of several layers of naturalist native and stark colonialist architectures, and the ideal location in which to completely disappear. 

These cartel planets know all about discretion. There is some understanding that most creatures there simply want to be left alone to haggle over supplies and spice and intergalactic delicacies in peace. The rest operate with the goal of allowing this peaceful flow of profit to continue unimpeded. 

These conditions make Iasus ideal for a quiet retreat from the laser-hot fury of the galaxy’s badly burned formerly wealthy. Paranoia seems more a boon than something to pick you out of a crowd, and word of suspicious activity travels fast when you’ve got as many friends as Rose does. 

Many an assassin has tried and failed to find them, if only for the most basic of blunders: they _ask around_ about the redheaded man and his tiny companion, trusting that the redhead and said tiny companion don’t have their own bargains struck with the shrewd people of this world. They owe at least _some_ of their relative safety to a changed spark plug in the butcher’s speeder, a repaired lightswitch for an old junk trader, Hux’s lingering hand on the shoulder of a flushed lumpia salesman. 

Still, Rose keeps a blaster tucked in a holster on her waist and a knife in her sleeve if she gets a sideways feeling in the morning, because she very much wants to stay alive and continue fulfilling both of her missions. 

She pulls the hood of her jacket up and loops her thumbs into the straps of her backpack as she passes through the busiest part of the market, where all of the food is sold. She narrowly avoids a scrawny child selling packets of spiced lumnuts as he ducks between her and a pair of pink-skinned Twi’lek sisters. Each passing face is scanned for the one which Rose is single-mindedly seeking, and frustratingly not finding anywhere. Luckily, he’s hard to miss.

She turns a corner, cutting around a nerfherder’s butchery stall, and feels the familiar tightening in her stomach when she spots him — _there you are_ — from yards and yards away, at the same time as she hears him. It’s possible that his nasally voice barking in fluent Huttese at some poor dealer is what really preceded him, but she can never be sure he’s there until he’s got her sight locked on him. He’s slippery like that.

She scurries in his direction, following his head floating above the crush of shoppers so as not to lose him. 

Hux cuts the same imposing figure as he always has, austere and straight up-and-down, a rigid inflexible beanpole with a puff of orange hair up on the top. He’s never lost the habit of wearing a large coat, either, though this one is grey with short sleeves and a dramatic lapel, the hem cut precisely at his knees. This, despite this planet’s hot, humid, tropical conditions, and his comorbid attachment to turtleneck sweaters and long-sleeved undershirts and his olive-green scarf. He never breaks a sweat, though, as if his self control extends down to his sudoriferous glands and they operate solely on his command. 

She wouldn’t be surprised. 

If he’s incognito in any way it’s in how he keeps himself groomed. Nobody expects _General Hux_ to be out in the world sporting a beard. To anyone who knew him before, it would be nigh-unthinkable. Nor the hair. Not “long” by normal standards but certainly for him, and it’s guaranteed to loose more than a few strands into his face after a day in the shop. He still has his odd angular beauty, but all of the hair softens it, blurs his cruel features at the edges some.

Rose requested the beard specifically. He doesn’t really like having it, but it’s tactical, and she likes to feel it on her thighs.

Hux is standing before the spread of assorted flavors, the table a cornucopia of colors and textures that attracts Rose with a force almost equal to that of her current target for credit pilfering.

Even if she didn’t speak a word of Huttese, Rose would still get the gist of what he’s subjecting the poor purveyor of fringi cakes to. He’s got a pair of silver tongs in one hand, using them to emphasize his perfectly accented, loftily spat words, and one of their glass containers in the other. It’s already mostly full of the little breakfast cakes. He must be attempting to wear down the seller for a better price, rather than just simply informing her of the inferior quality of her product, something he is also wont to do. 

Rose gets up close enough to hear him saying something about only paying a credit per two cakes, and that being the _right_ price, as if a _right price_ in a just society really exists — so she was right. He’s utterly predictable. 

The seller is holding her own against him, waving off his complaints like the sound of his voice is physical, a buzzing bloodbug. This has been their weekly routine for the two years Hux and Rose have lived on Iasus, and will continue to be as long as they live there. In truth the old Sullustan woman worries when the boy doesn’t have some fresh comment for her, and usually sends him away with a free cake and strict instructions to come back “not looking so much like a skinny chicken next week”. 

Rose pulls herself up into his orbit, nudging aside the small hovercart in her way that carries the evidence of all his errands: a full, squarish canvas bag from the laundrodroids, one crate with the lid on already, the other crate containing a refilled whiskey flagon and multiple black string bags full of groceries. 

The purchases never make much thematic sense to Rose, because she doesn’t have (or, honestly, doesn’t want) access to the black box that is the complex home economic strategy in Hux’s mind. Instead he’ll pull out each item for her, unveiling their individual futures with all the gravity of an Imperial cadet commander assigning career paths. 

Everything will be the best of their kind available. Nothing in their kitchen ever goes to waste. This is how Hux spends some of his endless energy, where he directs his consuming need for order and safety and security. 

By nature a forgetter of meals and bedtimes and most other things that aren’t whatever current problem she’s trying to think her way through, Rose is well-suited to this life of being cared for, like another one of his beloved cats. 

"Hey," she breezes, more so she doesn’t catch him unaware and meet his monomolecular blade for sneaking up on him —not that he’s ever given her an indication that this might actually happen, because she’s never successfully snuck up on him, but today could always be the day.

He loops the tong-bearing arm around her shoulders the second she sidles up to him, not even turning to greet her, to dip his head for the kiss on the cheek she usually takes by force if he doesn’t bow to her. Without missing a beat, he’s gesturing wildly at her, patting her stomach over her shirt, saying something that makes the cake lady’s huge black eyes narrow in suspicion —“are you really going to overcharge me to feed my _pregnant wife?!”_

Once the foreign words mentally reform in Basic, Rose whacks him over the arm with dramatized shock written plain on her face, because she cannot be _truly_ shocked that he would lie and use her in order to save a credit or two. On Hays Minor, though, it was bad luck to so much as discuss your future health in present tense, and the cultural imprint of this superstition runs deep even in Rose’s logical mind.

She is decidedly _not_ pregnant. And thank the Force for that _,_ with the way her would-be baby daddy speaks about her _._ But it’s not worth jinxing anything. 

“You can’t say _that,”_ she hisses, tugging her earlobe superstitiously, then his too, for good measure. If her grandmother heard the way Hux is carrying on — Rose would be declared barren forever, or likely to deliver twins next year on the dot. “That’s such bad luck.” 

“Ma’am?” Rose switches to Huttese, taking advantage of Hux’s momentary stunned silence to address the woman. “Please charge him whatever you want.”

Back again to Hux. “My dear? I’ve come to relieve you of some of your credits,” adding “please?” as a squeaky afterthought. 

He’s giving her a stink face now instead of acknowledging their inside joke, which means he’s mad. Not _that_ mad, but as retaliation he might not butter her toast in the morning, or will come wandering into the room with only one mug of tea for himself, or purposefully leave the cat’s latest tortured lizard corpse for her to clean up. 

Small beans. She can deal. _Force,_ but that expression of his makes her want to squish his cheeks in the vice grip of her palms. Is he going to turn those tongs against her? He looks an inch away from doing it. Disappointingly, he merely unloops his arm from her shoulder and turns away with a sneer, as if to say: _this is beneath me.You’re beneath me._

“ _She_ lies,” he says in indignant Huttese, to the seller, who seems unfazed. He picks over a cylindrical pink roll with white drizzle and digs down through a layer of three red bean cakes, obviously searching for something in particular, and turns a deeper shade of pink when he looks up and catches the Sullustan woman still watching them. 

She takes the opportunity to ask him if he’s planning on giving the poor girl a child anytime soon, anyway, to which he glances sidelong at his now red-faced but silenced wife, who is always eager to avoid the entire subject. 

Hux shakes his head, just as dramatic as Rose was when she whacked his arm and declared herself the arbiter of all fringi cake-related business. His voice casts into a fake whisper; he leans in across the table to the chuckling lady. 

“No, I should think not.” He nudges Rose’s shoulder with a wink, which on Hux’s face is a horrifying gesture. Still causes a flutter, though, which: damn him. 

“Don’t you need to be of a similar species in order to produce viable young?” 

Rose is pawing at him over his coat to find where he’s keeping the leather credit pouch, biting her lip to keep from making comments, lest it prompt them to keep on this stupid topic.

_Similar species,_ huh? She’s had this nightmare already. It plagues her sleep, an image that Rose does not try and grasp too firmly: their baby, sliding out of her body with scary green eyes already wide open, looking to overthrow the world order as soon as she gains access to language and toilet skills. 

She’s never told him about it. It strikes enough fear into her as a dream. But it’s always the same tiny squalling girl, and she always wakes up with an odd hollow in her chest to find the baby missing. 

“If you would let me pick out your breakfast in peace, please, madame,” Hux requests drolly, in vain trying to block her away from invading his jacket. Smoothing over whatever emotion the idea of _putting a baby in her_ roused in him.

The council elects to ignore this request of his. “I need money,” Rose insists, going for the leather credit-pouch she knows he’s got tucked into an inner jacket pocket. He pushes her hand away before she hits jackpot. 

“What for, how much, also, why?”

“It’s a surprise, all of those.” The second time she reaches for the credits he doesn’t stop her, just side-eyes her hard instead as she pulls out her bounty. 

“A good surprise, okay? For _you_.” She jabs at his belly like he did hers, to illustrate her point. 

“I’m taking this many.” Having dug through the pouch, Rose holds up a few five-credit bars for him to count up and subtract from the budget. While he assesses her haul, heart turned from trying to stop her spending money by the idea that he will directly benefit, she leans around to do the same to him. 

“Did you get any of the yellow ones?" The cakes on top of his pile are all his, evident by the fact that they are some of the worst choices available, in her opinion. There's a yellow sponge cake soaked in fermented tarine tea, triple-sour filled pancakes, some spicy rolls with a vegetable and nerf-marrow stuffing that sticks in the mouth. "With the djari bean curd? I want those. Yours taste weird." 

"What do you think of me? Forgetting what you like to eat?" He sniffs, perturbed, pulling his attention off her the second he’s got her total summed up. "Truly."

So crabby but so soft. Rose channels the burst of _Ilikeyou_ that sparks from his giving in so easily, for his standards, into popping up to tip-toes and dragging his face down with a hand bunched in the fabric of his long-sleeved undershirt. He obediently leans in but without pause in his mad cake search. 

Rose plants the kiss on his bearded cheek that she was initially robbed of — makes sure it's a loud, wet smack. It's got to last the ten or so standard minutes until she parts through the crowd to meet him again. 

With that, a request that he come find her when he’s done, and a kind pat on his back, she flees the booth. She leaves him merrily to his task, his full-price arrangement and his weird baby fantasy with the Sullustan woman.

**—**

The Toydarian kept his word. The gloves are still there on his counter. He parts with them for five credits even, although they should be weighed by the pound and charged as such, but Rose doesn’t care to risk arguing the point and having the things taken hostage. 

That settled, she has time to track down a florist, where she picks out a vine of dalu-flowers to leave for her family at the altar she keeps in the apartment. The blossoms have long white bodies that flower out into six pinwheel petals. They look like a cartoon sketch of flowers; the centers even seem painted with splotches of orange and yellow. At night, they exhale their heavy perfume, making their whole apartment smell of them by morning. 

By the time Hux tracks her down, Rose has also acquired two fried Burra fish, their whole bodies impaled on skewers, eyeballs and faces and tails and all. She eats the eyes first, because she doesn’t like to feel personally observed by the creature upon which she is so casually snacking.

The way Hux alerts her to his presence is not by the friendly greeting she'd chosen for him — that would be a reassuring, normal gesture. His choice is to clamp a hand around her upper arm while she isn't looking, so that she almost throws one of the fish at him in self-defense before she realizes who it is. This is one of the many times it becomes clear that it's good that Hux is the one with the monomolecular blade, not Rose. 

“ _Force,_ man!” she grouches at him, handing over his fish, the smaller of the two. Whatever irritation he’s holding over her seems well-buried; he’s got half a lip quirked up at her, eyes soft at the edges as he takes the offering. She flushes, knowing that nothing given to him is _ever_ received lightly. Even if it’s just food that he didn’t request in the first place. 

Still in her still-excited state, she finds it easy to fly back into a tizzy when he proceeds to chomp down the entire crispy tail in one bite. 

“That’s the _best part,_ you _animal_ _—_ ”

“Oh?” His lip twitches, as if he were about to crack a real-person grin. He’s enjoying this. Rose goes on high alert immediately, knowing he’s never happy unless he thinks he’s got some kind of upper hand. 

“Yes, _sir, and_ you might have _known_ a thing or two about savoring what’s good in life, if you ever had to live without a very kind Otomok woman bringing you fish. Without prompting!” 

She crunches pointedly on the spiny dorsal fin of her own Burra fish, shooting him a look equally heated as the one he’s now leveling at her. Was it the calling him ‘sir’ outside of the bedroom, while there are other creatures around? It just slipped out. But his reaction, the pink of his ears, the silent stiffening of his spine: her unintentional volley hit its target dead-on. She feels a fizz of excitement deep in her belly and carries on as if oblivious.

“And _while_ you still owe me —what, 350 credits, now? Is that it? The nerve.”

His hand is still on her arm, grip firm now as he uses it to lead her through the crowd at an easy pace. He parts the throngs easily, with his larger self and the packed hovercart that follows him, via his own watch, like a well-trained dog. “Where did the _fifty_ come from?” 

They start winding their way down from the port city center, erected atop a hill overlooking the wide shallow sea, to the public docking bay where their sail-speeder waits. In the daytime the ocean is visible from here as a long panel of shimmering greenish blue, occasionally broken by the flat bodies of X-wing sized fishes or the breeching of whales. At night, it’s a vast expanse of black nothingness, fringed by waves lapping at the shore that make a dull white noise. 

Their workshop is located an hour’s ride across the bay, where the landscape is densely forested and their home is thoroughly isolated — easier to protect.

Rose pretends to be shocked that he doesn’t remember why he’s indebted. Why he’s _pretending_ not to remember, more like. 

“This morning, when you were trying to tell me that Starhoppers have _never_ run with liquid engine coolant? And I said ‘yes they did, back before the Republic era because sonic cooling drives hadn’t been _invented_ yet’, and then you were like” — she slips into her version of an Imperial accent, which is such a garbage fire of an act that even Hux seems to be able to tolerate it, if only just to hear her struggle over the syllables — “‘no, starhopper engines were designed for absolute maximum efficiency in interstellar travel, it’s not possible they would have been saddled with liquid holding tanks.’” 

She drops out of the accent, feeling her throat constrict at forming such long words so misshapenly. It takes her triple the time to talk that way, too. The only word of his that she’s mastered is the trademark snap of ‘ _OHDAH’_ in ‘Former Order’ _._

“Anyway, you bet me fifty credits that it wasn’t true and that I’m delusional. But look how that turned out for you."

They'd cracked open the impossibly old hopper's engine panels with all the excitement of children tearing open gifts on Life Day, and Rose had howled in victory the second she spotted the blue fibercord tubing looping through the ship's metal guts. 

She would call him a sucker if she thought him a sucker, but he was always better at Destroyers and Dreadnoughts and all of the other vehicles he used to wrought terror upon the galaxy. Small craft from bygone eras would never have crossed his path like they did hers. It feels unfair to tease him further. 

“ _Fine_ ,” he concedes, only faintly bitter. It must be difficult, being him: wrong, all the time, yet staying so convinced of the utter opposite truth. And so bad at being the butt of jokes besides. “But I’ve still got fifteen hundred on you, now, haven’t I?”

That _is_ the unfortunate truth. However much he loves betting against her when he’s convinced of something, she loves it much, much more. Having a comfortable amount of credits and nothing better to do has made an utter fleece of her — she has no intention of ever paying him back in full. 

“Five less, now!” Rose motions to his half-eaten snack, a dessicated fish skeleton on a stick. “Let’s make it ten, accounting for parts and labor. So, I’m working on it. Unlike _you_.”

  
“I’ll make good on my debts, dear,” he shrugs cooly. “But if we’re accounting for parts and labor — ” 

“What, how much would you charge me for your house-keeping?” 

Rose carefully sucks out the Burra fish's cheek meat and loops her captured arm into his, which crooks at the right angle for her much shorter form. 

“Thousands.”

“Per _hour_?” 

A nod. “I’m very smart. Good with my hands.” 

  
“Then _I’m_ charging you for my companionship.” She squeezes his arm while they pass by the sleek dark wall of a former First Order office, trying to keep the smile from cracking her sarcastic facade. 

Four years of him in her life and she still feels a little like she shouldn't be so comfortable with the former conductor of universal chaos. It’s just that every time she rediscovers that, behind his imposing form and deadly stare, he’s just a soft warm crushable body _,_ it’s a physical jolt just as strong as the first time. 

The queen of questionable life decisions knows, deep inside, that there is no hope of going back. He’s poisoned her to all men who haven’t had their finger nearly bitten off by her, then responded by laying down deep state secrets at her feet and willingly charging headfirst into enemy lines for the mere chance, the _opportunity,_ to get to do so much as sniff at her discarded underwear. 

“For your companionship…” He spits out the word, shaking his head with a _tsk._ “I’ve pledged my life to you. Signed over my credits. My honor. My career. What more could you demand of me?” 

“Maybe something of real value?” Rose offers, words hitching up into a laugh, clear and easy. “No, okay, that was mean. I don’t know. Keep feeding me, maybe?” 

“She sells herself for a free lunch. That’s good to know.” 

His pace matches hers easily, despite how long his legs are and how short hers. 

“Only because I feel bad for you,” she answers cheekily, giving him a lazy shove in the ribs that doesn’t move him. The distance that opens does feel nice, though. She wasn’t paying attention to how hot and humid it is, how she’s broken a sweat that’s liable to cool into a disgusting film over her skin. 

Rose lets down her hood to feel the ocean breeze on her neck, lets it tease at her curled fringe. Why he hasn’t stripped off his coat in this heat, why he’s wearing long sleeves _under it,_ she has no clue, and never will.

“Were you able to find the coagulants for that junk-engine, then?” He pivots the subject, bringing up one of the main reasons they took the journey out to the market tonight instead of staying in and finishing repairs on the hopper. Rose nods, quick and unperturbed, patting the bulk of her backpack to indicate where everything’s stored away. 

“ _And_ I got the .38-gauge screws, a new pack of hexispanners, the ion-coupling cables that Old Tess has been out of for so long...” 

All for use on the sudden explosion of vehicles with reclaimed First Order engines coming through their docking bay. When Hux had learned that “ _Former Order Vehicles: Their Maintenance, Destruction and Rehabilitation!”_ has become one of the more popular manuals now published, he’d absconded with a copy for two days and didn’t emerge until he was able to look at the title without actually destroying something. 

The copy of the manual he emerged with was marked up in red pen from all of the corrections needed; the authors must have pulled their content from a terribly outdated archive. 

That information used to be Top Secret, a clearance level above _Ren’s_ in Snoke’s era. His perfectly conceived and created machines, diagrammed out for the viewing pleasure of the uneducated public, so that they may _destroy_ them. 

It was almost too much to bear, until a well-built job came through their doors that Rose couldn’t figure out. He was forced to realize what potential there was in these modified creations. How the rushed work of mediocre mechanics exposed each flaw in the original build, teaching them something entirely new about the structure as a whole, the fine physiology of a hyperspace ion engine. Lately even Hux has been known to take his own liberties with the framework engines, improving upon improvements.

He wants to know which kind of coagulant Rose bought, which devolves into a discussion of the merits of each. This would look more like an argument between a couple three times their age to anyone else, but both being quite passionate and forthright people, it’s nothing more than a casual debate between the two of them. 

Their way is lit by ill-maintained street lights, so that the side streets disappear into darkness after just a few feet. Rose leans back into the steady column Hux forms beside her, even after he’s declared all but his own choice of coagulants to be “bantha piss”. 

It seems to calm him. The arm that was holding hers switches to sling across her shoulders, pulling her against him. 

“You smell good,” he declares out of nowhere, head dipping in towards her, his voice a soft hand on her cheek. It must be the dalu-flowers, which hang off of her bag out of his sight. When she looks up, she sees that the yellowish street lamps have sucked all of the color from his face, rendering him an overexposed image of himself, he who already seems to slip in and out of his own visage. 

That colorless gaze captures hers for only a few moments before it flicks down to take in the sight of her exposed neck. His expression is faintly wistful, voice edging lower. 

He is so beautiful. Says one thing, meaning “I’m going to ruin you” underneath that thing, and wraps it in his unexpectedly gentle timbre. 

“Like a little night flower.” 

He trips on his t’s, enunciating very clearly, just so that she understands exactly the depth of his meaning. Rose feels the heat of his words light her entire body up.

**—**

The docking bay is deserted, save for the attendant droid, which demands ten credits for the favor of spitting out the correct key fob. It feels like they’ve been walking for Rose’s whole life, their Barra fishes long since finished and discarded for the alley cats. His arm is slung around her waist now, as much as it can be _slung_ from his height down to hers. 

Over the course of the walk she debated whether to corner him here, leave the gloves for another night, or for later. But the thought of some spacer getting to watch him fuck her via an overhead security camera doesn’t sound like the right mood for tonight. She forms silent plans in her head instead, consoling herself with the thought that the form of his body, so close to hers, is the same as if he were pressed against her, even through all their layers of clothing. She first met it in shadows like these, remembers it well enough to know him by the isolated rise of his hip or the cut of his collarbone alone. 

There’s a moment she thinks he’s going to bend her to his will, anyway, and have his way with her the second they’re granted the faintest illusion of privacy. It feels like her whole self is blooming underneath her human skin. 

Just as she’s inserting the key-fob to unlock the speeder, he crowds in behind her, standing close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off him. Enveloping her, as he does, naturally. For a second they both stand there, tense and excited by the closeness.

Then the moment passes — he was tossing something into the back of the speeder bed, she realizes, having been consumed by sensing him around her. He steps aside, without even a consolation pat on some part of her body. She breathes a sigh that’s half relief, half frustration.

— 

Their sail-speeder is a small, modified amphibious vehicle, a continual pet project of Rose’s that she built from the skeleton of an older airspeeder. It has an efficient miniature ion engine and a large single windsail; it _moves._

There’s nothing like it. She’s light enough to zip over the perpetually calm sea, but with the necessary bulk to haul their life's supplies around in. 

Rose hops onto the deck to start up the engine while Hux unpacks the hovercart, arranging everything in the speeder to his precise liking. _These_ things go _here, those_ go _there,_ no crushed bread or lost bolts or a husband driven to distraction by inattention to details. 

Said engine, once on, makes a noise not too deafening to yell over, but still loud and insistent. The repulsorlifts activate, lifting the craft from bobbing atop the water to its coasting height, just a few feet over the surface of the waves.

Rose sticks out a hand to help Hux up, noting, as she does every time, how his hand engulfs hers. He takes up the rear position, crouched by the engine in case it needs a manual restart. His olive scarf goes up over his nose, triggering her to remember her own.

The first time they ever boarded a vehicle together, he’d automatically arranged himself in the passenger seat, like it was a forgone conclusion. _Then_ , it sent her into a rage: the nerve of him, acting like he needed to be chauffeured everywhere. Now, she rather likes having the one duty fall to her every time. At least it's not separating and washing and folding the laundry. 

She’s the better pilot anyhow, hanging against the moveable sail in order to direct the skimmer _,_ which hums over the polluted dock water like it can’t wait to really get going _._ Once out in the bay proper, away from the lights of the docking station, Rose kicks the ship up to full speed. It almost threatens non-compliance at the change but Hux smacks it over the repulsor-sensor, which shocks it back to working order. 

But for the streaky light of the moon, half-concealed by clouds, they slice clean through the dark. A plasma lantern dangles off the ship’s sail, casting a soft white glow — just enough light for the two of them to see each other by. With radar navigation, a front flood light was rendered unnecessary, potentially even dangerous should they be followed back to their shop. 

This is the best part of leaving the house: the dark open plain of ocean and the unparalleled thrill of bulleting over it, the sensation of speed heightened by their proximity to actual physical matter. 

In space, up in the belly of a city-sized starship, high speed feels like nothing at all. Even _light speed_ is more of a headache than a thrill. Rose has discovered that she very much likes her life to remain as tactile as possible.

Water sprays up in a mist, stirred by the repulsors, but not much. What truly bothers is the salty air, whipping everything around that isn't tied down. The wind feels cold, compared to the breeze Rose caught on the street, though it's really the same temperature as the ocean itself. Like bath water.

Piloting is engrossing enough an activity to keep Rose busy, her mind turning in the background — she's thinking of how much she would have loved to do something like this as a child — but Hux always busies himself with something for the length of the hour. 

After nearly half an hour and no sea creatures sighted, Rose turns to see what he's doing, curious in that way she's become. Wanting to know how he passes the time, what he eats during off-world missions without her, if he's keeping warm wherever it's cold and vice-versa. She'd think to be embarrassed by it, dismissing herself as too comfortable, too in love with him, if he were anybody but Hux. 

To him, knowing the whereabouts and approximate last meal time of one's partner is rudimentary. Child's play. She can be the embarrassed party only in the alternate universe where _she_ was the one starting sentences with "so, when we're married — " the second time they'd ever had sex. (Which was the first time they'd done so without one pulling a knife on the other). 

The beam of the plasma lantern is pure white but not strong. It bounces against the sail with the motion of the speeder. Where the yellow of the alleyways made him look like a ghost of himself, her chest twists to see him _this_ way, cast in and out of relief but in the right colors, closer to what he really looks like, even with half of his face obscured by cloth. 

Now he's just a man, sitting on a crate, playing with a piece of string. Not that storybook figure meant to terrify. 

The twist in her chest could also be due to the way he’s staring at her body. Or _was_ staring at it, because they make eye contact immediately over their scarves. She holds it with him, wondering what he’s thinking. It looks like he might be smiling, but she can’t tell, his expressions are so minute. 

A minute or two elapses. Neither backs down from the staring contest. Rose raises her hand in a silent _hi,_ keeping her scarf in place, feeling the wind whip through her hair. (She prefers not to yell. _His_ is the voice made to boom out for millions to hear, not hers.) 

In response he busies his hands, occupied by the skein of black yarn he'd been using to finger knit. He untangles the stitches and reforms the string into a cat's cradle, holding it out in an invitation for her.

The autopilot temporarily switched on, Rose hops off the pilot’s platform and takes the three steps that separate them, until they’re knee-to-knee. She barely looms over him, despite his being sat down and her standing before him, but the few inches of height she does have on him might as well be miles. Whenever _he_ has to look up at _her_ , no matter the circumstance, it’s the same shot of adrenaline through her spine. 

They’ve played this game so much by now that neither of them needs to see what they’re doing. This is good, because Rose doesn’t want to break the staring contest and he will never be the one to back down first. The string of impossible attraction tied from her ribs to his grows taut as the pace of their game picks up, passing the cradle from one pair of hands to the other. 

Eventually his eyes, half-lidded, drift downward, from her face over her body. He loses the staring contest but holds steady in the game of cat’s cradle. They can play that flawlessly in their sleep.

Victory comes with a thought that makes Rose feel like she’s spent too much time around Hux: _Dummy_ . _Distractions are dangerous_. 

She’s glad of their scarves keeping them apart. The autopilot on this thing is still kind of buggy, after all. She needs to follow her own advice, where attention is concerned, and get back up there — 

This thought comes, unfortunately, just a second before he takes it upon himself to stop the game unannounced. Instead of playing his turn in the quick rhythm of crossing and uncrossing the yarn, Hux reaches to pull his scarf down, revealing his fuzzy ginger face. He leaves her with her hands up, fingers still tied. 

She doesn’t have the mind to care. His mouth is so pretty, she notices, now that he’s submitted it fully to her greedy gaze. Rose holds her breath in anticipation of what’s coming next. 

Her cheeks burn when exposed to the night air. He pulls her down by her scarf, his shockingly pink mouth opening slightly before he fits it over hers in a firm, consuming kiss. His lips at first are cold and it makes her momentarily feral with needing to warm him and wanting to bite him, all at once. His hands cradling her face, his lips, his tongue, the inside of his mouth — _all_ are colder than her own. They remind her of the wind that rushes past the length of her neck, brushing her skin with intense relief. 

That’s how it always feels, when he stops staring and finally kisses her: like a shot of respite. Like the river of tension between them finally ( _finally_ ) gets to lift. 

As is custom, he breaks the kiss far before Rose is ready. As a consolation prize he kisses her nose too, then sweeps his finger through the cradle entrapping her hands, freeing her. 

Before she has to start back up to pilot, she glances at his face once again. The shadows dance with the movement of the lantern, his whole visage liquid, baby-faced one second to nothing but carved-out cheekbones and brow the next. _Fitting,_ the thought comes. It suits this man of many faces, who pulls each out of his hat whenever he might need it. 

**_—_ **

The fluidity, the absolute lightness of her physical being, poured over her iron spine.

To put a word to it? She is…

Statuesque.

He will never tire of this image. The way she clings to the boat’s sail with such casual strength, how her torso tweaks just so, leaving, for his viewing pleasure, her calves and thighs and the maddening curve her hips take, her arse practically primed to be grabbed...

His wife is a goddess. 

She has made a weak man and a terrible poet of him. Nevertheless, the thought feels like the truest thing that’s occurred to him today, or maybe the truest thing he’s ever thought. Tonight the hand-stitches are as sloppy as he’s ever made them, but he can’t care. He’s got a better idea. 

He draws her in for a kiss, his possessive streak demanding it suddenly. It: her lips against his, her warmth of temperature, mood and being that attract him like a helpless moth. The spark behind his fall from grace. She opens her mouth for him like it’s nothing. He wants to bite at her lip for all of her teasing, but if he walks down that road they’re going to end up capsized over a blasted sea monster 

She replaces her scarf and turns back to the sail, Hux patting her ass upon her quitting his part of the speeder. She doesn’t swat his hand away.

Half an hour later, in which he ogles her so long he goes from feeling lecherous to a passive admirer of the arts, back to lecherous, they pull in to the tidal inlet that indicates their hidden-away repair shop. It’s marked by a rock formation that juts out of the ocean a ten-minute swim from shore. Rose swings around this landmark, a boulder sticking out of the sea with one craggly tree atop, to land on their own dock. The treeline and its attending forest floor border the sandy ocean beach with only a meter or two of room to spare for all the sand and driftwood and seashells. 

The landscape around their home is far more impressive than the old structure itself. Iasus is particularly oxygen-rich, so the trees that grow in this tropical climate have the thickness and height of true giants. _Behemoths._ 100 meters tall, at least, and in the 30’s plus for circumference. Life grows thick around the vast trunks of the trees, so many vines and ferns and birds and assorted mammals. 

To Hux, ever the pragmatic strategist, the beauty nor the biodiversity of the jungle mean nothing. 

The mammoth trees afford both good visibility and good cover; their foliage doesn’t even begin until many, many dozens of meters above human heads, and the massive root systems provide good places to nap when he’s wandered off too far on a walk.

Their house is actually a converted shopkeeper’s hovel, a little apartment tucked on top of the repair garage, which sits a safe enough distance from the water. The workshop itself and the forest clearing surrounding it, large enough to accommodate larger starcraft, make up the bulk of what they call “home”. Besides that, Rose built herself a climate-controlled greenhouse, almost the size of a building itself, and a plot of land for the longer growing root vegetables. 

It is all rather nondescript, which is exactly what they were searching for with the heat of too many targeting lasers on both of their backs.

They’d offered the previous owner, an elderly human man, an outrageous sum in exchange for the deed to his shop. 300,000 credits, in a bag, ready to go. Rose had asked him later if he didn’t think they were mobsters of some kind, instead of from the Collective, running up on him in their long coats with solid credit and demands that he immediately relinquish his unsuccessful, quiet repair shop. Either way, he’d seemed happy enough to abscond with the money and the burden of running a business off his back. 

In the time they’ve been on this planetoid, their life has grafted on top of the bones of the property. The garage is painfully well-organized, everything with a place and in its place, and spotlessly clean. Here they park the speeder with the hovercart inside, unloading everything to carry up the narrow staircase to their apartment by hand. 

Inside, an insistent _bleep bleep bleep_ becomes apparent, courtesy of the Imperial mouse droid MSE-6-P045R — ‘Missy’. Having heard them enter the 50-meter radius of the shop, she rolls over on freshly-oiled, but still creaky old wheels, inquiring as to the exact nature of their business with “the mighty Empire”. 

The droid is not much use in a practical sense, except as an entertainment system for the cat and something Hux likes to shuck bottle tops at when he's drunk. MSE hardly recognizes their biosignatures half the time, and alarms like they’re being attacked when they first get home. 

There isn’t much to be done about what she can’t accomplish anyway, because MSE’s untouched Imperial coding is somewhat sacred to Hux, as well as being nigh impenetrable — few good manuals for learning those codes survived the Republic. So MSE ambles around the workshop, fetching tools and accepting tools, delivering the odd message from woman to bridegroom, or alerting them of incoming holo-calls. Generally just doing her best, all the time. Hux switches off her alarm feature with the toe of his boot, sending her on her way again. 

Rose crouches and starts unpacking her backpack first, the sloshing coagulants and boxes of small parts all neatly labelled. He’s going to help her grab things from inside the bag when she slaps his hand away, leaving an actual sting in her wake. He retracts it, holding it close to his chest, mock-hurt but really: anything that touches his wife becomes holy ground, sacred. His own dirty appendages included. 

“It’s your surprise, dummy!” She explains, shifting the bag so her body is between it and Hux. From this position she selects what to unpack, handing over whatever is deemed safe enough to do so. 

He makes a noise to express his disapproval. If this ‘surprise’ is the reason behind her behavior, he’ll be glad to finally see what it is. 

“And no, I won’t _tell_ you what it is.” 

“And you won’t simply... give it up.” He levels a look at her like she’s a rebel fighter fleet that he intends to crush. Like his looks are supposed to actually intimidate her — or something. He’s still holding the slapped hand like a precious cat. 

They haven’t worked in so long, but he likes making sure she knows when to be afraid, as a courtesy. 

She rolls her eyes, handing over a packet of long black carbo-core screws, to replace the ones in the ankle joint of his cybernetic leg. He slips them into his pocket, hoping she didn’t pay full price for the pack.

“Okay, but you only get one try.” 

He pretends to think it over, hands moving to clasp behind his back as he paces, considering. While he does so the pile of goods next to Rose’s backpack grows. He bends to pick some of the smaller pieces up, kissing the top of her head while he’s down so low. 

“Is it spice?” He finally asks into her hair, real hope behind the joke in his voice. She shakes her head and the pang of disappointment that hits his stomach is, oddly, real.

“You always think it’s going to be spice. It’s _never_ going to be spice.” 

She’s getting up; he moves, and helps her, unnecessarily, with a hand on her arm. When he speaks he uses his quiet, convincing tone. 

“You know, if you got some, I would share with you. That’s saying something. I like spice quite a lot.” 

Up on her feet, she whirls around on him and pats his chest, his bright eyes following her the whole time. “I know, buddy. And you’re very kind for sharing the hypothetical spice. _”_

“That’s right. I _am_ very kind. Spice is wonderful.” 

She laughs, shaking her head and staring at the hand still on his chest. ( _He_ makes _her_ laugh. This is among the greater joys of life outside of the Order.)

“Why would you even trust me to find you drugs.” She pats him again, lamely, as if to cover for the unnecessary contact. “I don’t know what makes good spice good. I’d buy you expensive leaves.” 

“Oh. No, I trust your nose.” He tweaks said appendage and it finally gets her to look up at him, so he can peer at her with narrowed eyes. “It knew good Glitter, did it not?” 

A shiver runs visibly up her spine at the mention of Glitter. A muscle memory, perhaps, of the long-discontinued Imperial drug, which had been initially developed to enhance Force-users’ powers but was a powerful stimulant in non-users. Or its attending images of their trip to the Academy on Arkanis, where Hux had uncovered a vial in a commander’s room. 

That was the first time he actually saw her naked body in the light. Could worship her like she had always deserved. 

The mood switches suddenly from light-hearted back to the blooming tension; her smile becomes one more knowing, more commanding, eyes trained on his lips. Hand still on his chest, the other drifting up to play with the hair by his ear. 

She stands as an equal with him, from so far below. His chest hurts with how much he loves her. 

“Okay, you can’t assign my nose the credit that the Glitter’s due.” 

He shakes his head, stepping closer to her, controlling the volume of his voice down to the exact register he knows she likes, a cheap move really — almost as cheap as the way she’s tucking her face up to his, but retreating just far enough when he nudges in to kiss her.

“You cannot tell me what to do, madame,” he breathes. 

She snorts unattractively, and so close to his own face. The hurt of love grows louder. If she were to step on his boots now, he would keel over from sheer emotion. The wanting to kiss her is already threatening his life. 

“I think I can prove _that’s_ a lie, Armie.” 

So much for visible shivers. He closes his eyes with an exhale the second she uses his nickname. She is the only person left in the world who calls him that. And to stamp such ownership over him? 

She gets as close as possible to his mouth without making contact, her voice a smooth whisper. The kind only audible in the closest of quarters, dripping with her unique brand of sultriness.

“No, it’s not spice, so you’re out of guesses and out of luck.” One kiss, taken from him before he can react. She pulls back from his search for a second. He lives dangling on the end of a thread that’s tied to her. Sometimes it’s mercifully slack; other times, like now, it threatens to strangle him. 

As some kind of method of relief, she leans back in so close their lips _do_ touch, but she’s still speaking in the voice that reaches into his brain and scratches a very deep itch. “Must suck to suck, huh?” 

With that and still no proper kiss, her mouth splits into a shit-eating grin and she flounces away from him, back to unpacking the speeder. He’s stood in shock, trying to process his life, when she reaches for the crate of groceries after already shouldering the laundry bag and snaps him out of it.

“Leave that,” he says, waving his hand at her. She does, without needing to be told again. In terms of being able to carry heavy things, she’s better-endowed, but it’s right that he does it anyway. The filing away of their shop parts is his task, too. Their garage staying organized is due to him, and him alone. 

“I’ll be upstairs, then?” Rose says, already heading towards their locked office and the door that leads to their apartment. She says something about a bath, and then is behind the door and gone away from him. He stands in his spot a second longer, listening to her footsteps up the narrow staircase, rubbing at his slapped hand absently with the opposite thumb. 

When their heavy front door thuds shut, he lets out his frustration with a single growling kind of sigh. The air still smells of her, and he’s covered in her atoms, so Rose’s being out of eyesight doesn’t ease him much; what _does_ is when he finally gets to filing things away. The task engrosses him for a moment, and then it’s gone. They didn’t buy much.

Too wound-up to shut himself away with her in their tiny apartment yet, Hux attempts to busy himself with re-counting hexagonal bolts. It doesn’t work. His attention keeps drifting. 

She’s infected him. He should have taken her back all the way back in the docking bay. He’d had the impulse to wrap one arm around her middle, pinning her to him, the other sneaking into her trousers to extract from her his prize: a helpless, squirming orgasm, brought on by nothing but his skillful fingers.

_Stars_. Eyes closed against that image, he finds himself instead picturing it with perfect clarity — with the smell of her shampoo still in his nose, he can practically breath in her hair, feel her body tensing up against his. When she comes for him, it’s a heady release for them both. 

She’s only right upstairs. But — he wants to calm down first. Be able to take things slowly. Draw her out a bit. If he’s reading her sudden pliability with any sort of accuracy, she’s got something hiding up her sleeve for him and he thinks he should arrive well-prepared; that’s simply good battle etiquette. 

The creak of MSE’s wheels fades in from behind him, as does the muffled _BLEEPBLEEPBLEEP_ of her functional sensor’s alarm. Hux turns to see Charlotte, their brown tabby shopcat, riding atop the mouse droid’s blocky body. She’s licking her paw to groom at her ear, tail curled over the droid casually. MSE is going haywire, rolling around and around Hux’s feet in mechanical panic over the unexpected topload. 

The scene never fails to make Hux think something along the lines of “ _same”_ when he sees MSE working herself up over the blase ruiner of her tiny Imperial life. 

They found Charlotte as a scrawny feral kitten and groomed her into a very respectable, spoiled house-cat. She has the same way about her that Millicent once had. Both the kind of cats who _know_ they’re the universe’s superior creature, and don’t deign to beg for attention from anyone but their most worthy subjects. Charlotte is not so feisty as to fight him, though, when he picks her up off the poor droid’s back; the cat goes limp, then lands neatly when she’s dropped back onto her paws next to MSE. 

The droid keeps bleeping, her top sensor plate needing rewiring as badly as everything else about her. Hux kneels to switch off the alert manually, from the panel that pops open when he presses a button on MSE’s side. 

  
“Don’t think I feel sorry for you,” he reminds the droid, replacing the panel after keying in the user-code. “Because I don’t.” 

That said, he picks MSE up and personally carries her to the lubricant vat, feeling not unlike a mother giving the baby candy to keep it from crying. What the droid _really_ needs is some new parts and a complete tune-up. He should let Rose rewire her after all, but it’s a sentimental thing. To erase her functionality, the technology from before his birth preserved so carefully, would be to erase a bit of history. It would be a shame. 

He closes the vat’s lid over MSE, his conscience reminding him again that he should give the project over to his wife. His bleeding heart is quite the liability, it seems. 

Hux doesn’t see where the cat gets off to, but he’ll find her before retiring for the night. He exits the shop through a side door, where there’s a little table with an ashtray, a cigarra box, and two chairs, waiting against the side of the building. Locks the door behind him, and tests it; just in case.

Into the wobbly chair he folds his long limbs, suppressing a sigh as he goes down that would sound too much like his father’s if he let it out. He covers his face with his hands, elbows on his knees, resting himself like that for a long few minutes. The air outside is stagnant and hot and sticky, but he’s used to it. Might not even mind it, if you tortured that information out of him, after living for so long in the artificial environments of star cruisers. 

The lush foliage of the planet is stubborn, too, baby fiddlehead ferns and moss and wild lilies crowding to grown against the concrete foundation. A little pink house lizard darts out from beneath a frond, near Hux's shoe: though he detests the things, he flicks away the impulse to squash the thing with his boot. It's not worth the mess. And good, changed men don't squish innocent geckos, who in all honesty deserve to live about the same amount as they do.

_Sucks to suck,_ her words lash across his brain from out of nowhere. He digs his fingers into his brows, using the physical sensation to distract himself. Her mouth, on the boat — opening up to him on sight. His kitten, so obedient. And then saying such mean and cheeky things… 

He’s seeing stars before he realizes how hard he’s been digging into his own eye sockets. No, Rose isn’t good for his health at all. But neither does he really do much for himself. 

He needs a smoke and a walk before he’ll be able to calm down enough to go upstairs and not completely destroy her. 

Hux has half a pack of fresh herbal cigarettes left, but he goes for the half-smoked butt of last night’s Naberrie cigarra over any of those. Might as well be economical, and not burn down half of a new cigarra anyway while trailing off in thought. The multi-tool in his pocket has an arc lighter, activated with the touch of a button, which he digs out.

The first drag is ashy. He exhales it without breathing in first, foot tapping rapidly against the concrete. Too much energy, all the time. Even he doesn’t know where it comes from. 

It could be his real food diet — as opposed to the nutrient milk he’d preferred while commissioned in the Order — the bounty of human affection he receives daily, or the living in a real biome, finally getting to use his logical brain and not just his cunning militaristic one. Maybe it’s a combination of all of those things. 

He pops back up to his feet, feeling ill-contained by the chair and irritated at it, all of a sudden. He ambles out into the dark garden, the damp grass wetting the cuffs of his pants. 

The second drag is much better than the first, actually conveying the taste of lavender and mugwort and dried blabarberry. Blended in is one of the more unique of Naboo’s green leaves, which provides a mildly sedative effect — one so subtle he barely feels it, but which does help bring down his heart rate. 

The moon this planetoid shares with another just like it, Iasos, shines bright, now that the clouds have cleared up. He can see her garden quite well by that light alone, now that his eyes have adjusted. He finds himself studying the plain green leaves of the root vegetables, how their fuzzy surfaces catch the moonlight.

Truthfully — another drag, longer and slower than the others — he gains no joy from gardening or botany and has little interest in learning to do so, as he has learned to appreciate so many other things in this life. He encourages what she’s doing, knowing that the fruits of this labor go into each of the meals he crafts for them, and that it brings her much joy, but cooking is far and away enough of an endeavor for him. He prefers _that_ predictable and comprehensible world, where if the same steps are followed each time, the same thing always results. 

But he cannot help admiring her work. Everything seems to grow for Rose, and grow into the biggest version of itself; he’s never seen tuber leaves so large, nor blossoms so beautiful as the ones that line the outside of her greenhouse. He stops in front of the hedge of purple donar flowers, their scent loud and sweet, a stark contrast to Rose’s heady cloud of dalu-flower.

The blossoms have white and indigo-patterned labellum, with five pale purple petals splaying out behind like stars, and grow in groups of impressive size. Beautiful on their own merit, but apparently they -- as in the blossoms themselves -- are also empathic _,_ somehow. Or is it telepathic? 

Whatever it is, and however strongly Rose chooses to fool herself into believing, _he_ doesn’t really think that flowers can feel things. But he lingers in front of them anyway, his smoke smoldering, just as he'd predicted he would allow it to.

When Rose planted the donar hedge, she’d told him the story, or what she remembered of how her grandmother told it. They’re from the planet Ilthor, where the native species used to live in homes that used archaic repulsorlifts to hover above the world’s dense, glittering jungle canopy. They worshipped nature as a many-limbed living god, and were deemed not worthy to live in the glory of its untainted environment. 

But a faction emerged; they wanted to dive into the pleasures of the living forest — to explore the lush ecology of their mother goddess’ own creation. They heard her call after them in their sleep, with a voice unlike any voice. They heard her speak her name: “Mother Jungle.” 

When he heard this story for the first time he’d almost laughed at that, until he saw the look in her eyes. She was close to tears. The sincerity in her voice was real, not ironic. He’d remembered then that Hays Minor was a dead world long before her birth, and understood how much the story moved her. He tasted his own old childhood fantasies of dry plains and warm kitchens and open vistas. So many things that those foolish children could never have. 

The chosen followers of Mother Jungle had descended to the surface of the planet, and discovered wonderful things. A semi-sentient plant with crystalline bark and a jellyfish head, which she illustrated by acting like — well, a jellyfish, one was meant to assume, if one was generous. It was yellow and purple and grew in families that thought with one complex mind.

And this, the donar flower. Her face grew soft. Not sentient like the Bafforr tree; more like a refractor of “energy”, as she said, in her wistful and conveniently avoidant way. Maybe the lingering energy of someone dead, or the emotional energy you carry around, “you know, things like that.” 

“No, I don’t _know,”_ he’d said. “Because I believe in science, not ghosts.” 

She continued like he hadn’t spoken a word. That was a mercy, because he felt like a knob the moment he said the words out loud, and regretted them. 

“So if you plant them in memory and think of someone when you look at them, maybe they help ‘em kinda… feel that, maybe. Who knows, you know?” She smiled up at him, squinting in the punishing sun. He remembers that she was wearing her hair back in a ponytail, which made her look far younger than her twenty five years. 

“You’re also supposed to plant two for every one that’s harvested. That way you don’t upset the whole, uh… sacred balance of everything.” The way she scooped dirt around the roots of the tiny plant was exceedingly gentle, _he_ wanted to be the scraggly stick she was planting in the warm earth. 

He remembers the heat beating down on his neck. How he felt odd not helping her, but didn’t want to dirty his hands before replacing a condenser-core. A thousand times he’s been back here in his mind and every time he regrets not squatting down to her, instead quipping something like, “you sound like the Jedi…” 

— and like _that,_ he’s back in his body, the memory gone away.

Is this the donar bloom’s power? Memories like this float to the surface of his mind all the time; there’s very little he doesn’t remember about the past four years. They’ve been like the very first of his life. But this one is so sharp, while so delicate, it feels intrinsically different. 

His wife has certainly been right before, and about things much more befuddling than this. 

Hux tilts his head at the plants, puzzling over them for a moment as they sway in the night air. There’s one in particular upon whose roots he leaves small stones, sometimes, if he’s feeling sentimental. As he does so he thinks of the abstract concept of his blood family. Sometimes his mother in particular. _Always_ excluding his father. 

The emotions that arise when he does this feel like white noise; he’ll explore them no further than to recognize their roughest shape. He lets them be. It feels like enough just to feel things in the first place. 

His relatives are all gone now, fortunately for them. He hopes they’re… fine, in whatever afterlife they’ve escaped to. Likelier than not they were all bastards, too, and the galaxy is better off now that it is only he who remains. _Armitage_ , the kitchen-woman’s bastard, skinny and useless all his life, is their lone and leashed scion. Cursed to goodness for the rest of eternity too, no less. They’re all apoplectic, wherever they are. 

He hopes that the donar flower somehow shows his dead father the way he begs for merciful release at his wife’s feet; how he spends so much of his time and energy on simply being _nice_ to her. Subjecting Brendol to that vision for all eternity would make Hux very happy. It would make him believe in sentient plants and ghosts and gods after all. 

The herbal cigarra is nearly burnt through by now. 

Tabac was never his choice, the scent too harsh and the effects too devastating on his precious voice. This blend, however, tastes clean and sweet and floral, the notes complex and not too strong. He usually likes to pick apart the complex interplay of flavors, to breathe deep and really feel the smoke’s soothing effects, but his mind is a bit too scattershot for savoring. 

The cigarras are a small and unhealthy indulgence, of which he partakes in relatively few, nowadays — except for the whole “putting themselves in the way for criminal retribution” business. At least in that regard, they have the protection of the Collective to rely on, and an armory stocked well enough to handle multiple attempts on their lives. 

Hux cannot walk down pleasant paths of memory without the attending spirals of anxiety, it seems. As if to punish himself for daring to recall the good things that have happened to him. Or to punish him for having those good things in his wretched life at all. 

His steps take him back through the outdoor patch, thinking about how easily all of this can — _will,_ his brain insists _—_ be stripped away. How small and delicate their lives are. How easily razed the garden and the greenhouse and the shop and the whole planet, really. 

A quiet, familiar anxiety creeps up in his throat.

Hasn’t he been the one doing said razing many times before? Would it not be _fair_ that the same happen to him? Simply loving fewer things with all of his ferocity does not make them any safer. Returning credits and information to the so-called “ _Collective”_ will not make his amends worth anything, in his victims’ eyes; neither will the pardoning of all First Order soldiers who presented themselves to that “Collective”, as he had done. 

One of the few things he misses about being an officer of the Order is the lack of a meaningful fear of death. How there was never anyone whose harm he’d ever dreaded more than his own (Except for Millicent, of course). 

This fear, this burden of love, is something he will live alongside for the rest of his life. It will never cease to form the cold pit of his stomach, color his moods, or impact his decisions. 

He gladly accepts this, the fool he is. In exchange, he gets to experience all of those things he’d deemed outside of the realm of possibility for himself: squishy, mushy, human-type things. Love and softness and kindness and companionship. _Friendship_ , even. The sensation of drinking beer while outdoors and of laughing with a group of people and of being the little spoon. 

One last inhale and the flame hits the paper filter, a sign that it’s time to head inside. He taps out the last of the ash on the grass and tucks the filter into his pocket so he can discard it properly.

Even after the endless worrying, Hux does feel more settled than he did before lighting up. These thoughts are more of a gloomy origin than a panicked one; they form his constant internal monologue, assuaged only by work and defensive preparations and the all-encompassing brightness of Rose’s presence. 

He looks up towards the warm light glowing in one of their apartment windows. She’s right up there; she will be his, whenever he chooses to go and take her. The absence of her has made his skin buzz with the emptiness she should be filling. He feels at least a fraction less full of the savage blood than he did a few minutes before. A more appropriate level of brutality fills him now. Something he can hone, can focus.

The longer he’s out here, the better it will be. Hux has always been a fan of delayed gratification. But the time has come. 

He sets off for home at a leisurely pace through the lush, black night. 

**—**

Does she cry out for him? Does she need him? Does she tug upon the invisible string he’s let himself be tied to? 

She is a little witch, after all, and he, her docile lamb. Back in the garage he’d wanted to put her down on her knees and show her just what happens to mouths that open up to tease him so. 

But he did not do it. He did not even kiss her, when she made clear it was her right to dole those out. 

He is nothing if not good — so very good — for her. 

**—**


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Updated the tags because inspiration struck. Again, referring to comic canon for their backstories but most of the elaboration is my own and isn't meant to depict any one single culture. I just like making things up. :-) Also, I love these two so much and everyone for commenting and reading. Truly, I appreciate that my weirdly painstaking effort here isn't for nuthin'. I just love Hux and Rose so much and hope you enjoy gratuitous rambling about how they got together. A prequel fic for this is incoming, by the way. I have too many idea.

**—**

**_MORNING, same day_ **

  
  


Rose wakes from a dream that looks and feels and smells like when she was ten years old and nearly died from a respiratory infection. 

Few other memories of that time remain. There’s the sensation of something rubbery cupping her mouth; the dry blasts of oxygen from a tank which Hue Tico had procured, at length, from the First Order-controlled pharmacy. Except for blurry notions like this, and the one clear memory remaining, it’s a blank spot. 

That one clear memory, despite its singularity,  _ refuses  _ to be forgotten. It clings around the edges of her restless sleep, and curses her to these useless emotional mornings. 

The memory is this: waking suddenly from awful, hazy, nauseating dreams to the sensation of being in a weightless body. Rose was lifted up in the air. 

Was she dead? Were these the strong arms of a god? The celestial body felt like her  _ appa’ _ s, strong but soft around the middle... 

There was _light,_ then, so much of it, where before it was dark and comfortable. 

It  _ was  _ her father holding her, Rose snapped into realizing, with all of the clarity she’d ever had in her little life. 

She’d opened her eyes for the first time in days. Unfortunately, none of her four gathered Tico family members was paying close enough attention at that moment to take notice.

For the few seconds before she lapsed back into her fog, she was entirely, perfectly aware of how he held her limp, sick body like she was tiny again. 

_ Appa’s  _ chest was so close to her, she could smell tabac and his shaving soap. She did not feel good at all, but wherever he made contact with her she was warm. Nothing was going to happen, as long as she was up in his arms, a balloon of a girl just a fever spike away from flying away forever. 

He was here now. She would be fine; she wasn’t going to wander off into the quiet night _.  _

Many other things were happening in that moment, and Rose noticed all of them. Paige and her mother’s long brown arms flashed as they changed the bed sheet, their clever hands and the light banter between them making quick work of the drudgery — a shared habit of Tico women. What they were saying is lost to her faded memory but the cadence of their voices is lodged inside of her, a secret treasure to be kept forever.

There was also: the openness of the space around her. The buoyancy of her body. The notion that she did not want to leave this room quite yet, and stop feeling all of the things she was currently feeling. The terrible  _ and  _ the transcendent.

Hue moved a bit, jostling the body of little Rose who must have made a noise, expressing the discomfort of which she was now consciously aware. The memory fades then, cruelly, with just the instinctive sound which Hue made to comfort her. 

_ Ssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh —  _ held out, just like that. More an exhale against the side of her head than anything. 

  
He must have said something, too. Hue always knew what to say, even if he mixed up her and Paiges’ names more often than not. 

No amount of wanting nor grief will bring these words back either.

From this pool of lost time Rose plunges back into the present, into the fact that she is nearly a decade, a world, and a lifetime away from being the girl in her father’s arms. Her body is heavy and does not feel real, until it does, all at once. It takes a moment for her to re-integrate her wandering psyche with her healthy body, all ten fingers and toes and other parts that work perfectly. 

The lingering physical memory of illness fades, too, leaving just a trace of a sick pit in her stomach. 

Hux is gone, or at least not within arm’s reach when she clumsily smacks around his side of the bed.  _ If  _ he even came to bed at all. It’s not rare for him to stay up until dawn, working on something or other, sleeping in odd snippets during the day instead.

A quick inspection shows evidence of his  _ having  _ joined her, but the rumpled sheets are cold. Rose holds her breath, looking out the ceiling-windows above at a cloudless lilac expanse. Just after sunrise. 

It’s so quiet, he must be downstairs in the shop. The apartment is empty but for her. If she were declared the last humanoid in the entire universe, she could hardly feel any difference. 

The open sky is an eyeball, staring blankly, mocking her. 

The weight of tears is a familiar stone in her chest, which moves up into her throat with predictable efficiency. Rose was always quick to any kind of emotion, tears included, just got good at putting a lid on it when crying was discovered to be detrimental to the Resistance mission.  _ Then  _ she discovered how much nicer it is to live without the lid keeping her true self separate from the outside world.

Before long she’s cried out the last of them into the knitted blanket. The fit passes quickly and leaves her feeling empty but brighter inside, and dissipates the nauseous knot in her stomach. 

When your entire family and home planet are gone, blown to pieces, it’s a fact of life that some mornings are a little tougher than others. No matter how well you’ve pushed past the pain and rebuilt the future. 

Rose dries her face on the blanket, then falls back, finding all of this “being awake” effort to be exhausting. Too many feelings. There’s the void of loneliness that opens up inside of her sometimes, and it’s better to sleep it closed than try and think her way well again on her own. 

She’s still locked in the drowsy comfort of pre-sleep, drifting in and out of consciousness, when the  _ whoosh  _ of the downstairs door catches her woozy attention. Up up up she climbs through the clouds until she’s back again, in the bedroom chunk of their circular home, listening for the friend who is coming to save her from being alone.

The sound of  sure steps pounding up the stairs lights a firecracker of excitement in her.. 

Then the front door unlocks, opens, retracts. Her heart hiccups. The rush of her blood chants  _ someone's there someone's there someone's there. _

Rose feels like a dog waiting for its master, all excitement with no voice to speak it. 

He doesn’t call out for her, probably thinking she’s still asleep. Rose is so impatient because she knows him: Hux always takes forever removing his shoes and washing his hands before he touches her or any of the surfaces in their home. So he’s wasting time doing  _ that,  _ when he  _ could  _ be making her all dirty with his greasy mechanic hands. 

_ Why won’t you be where I am already? _

She needs to be happened upon, taken in and kissed in a fit of desire. And yet she’s paralyzed by an unknown force to avail herself of him. Instead she thinks very hard in his direction. 

He’s no Force wizard mind reader; she wouldn’t want one. But if he were, he would hear her as if she’d screamed herself hoarse. If he had any kind of intuition at all, he’d heed her psychic call, but he doesn’t. 

Rose feels as small and helpless in her marriage bed as she did when a little girl in the memory-dream. 

  
  


She can’t tell what’s happening out there. What he’s doing. Her whole body is made up of wanting. She feels like a draining bathtub, needing to be stopped up. The loneliness in her is a hurt creature stomping around with big feet. 

If he ignores her and leaves again, she might actually die, which would be a humiliating way to go, then Hux would probably live with her preserved corpse for the rest of his life in desperation to avoid the tragedy of not slipping into middle age by her side.. 

_ No.  _ She has to live long enough to kick him out of an airlock herself. That’s their agreement. 

All she can do is lay stretched out on her side, neck half hidden under sleep-loosed hair and half exposed, thinking:  _ I am small and feel tender and I want you to please come and kiss me.  _

Hux would come at once, if she called out for him. That’s what he lives to do nowadays, more or less. 

But right at this very time, according to Rose’s incredibly adamant post-dream brain, he has to choose to wander in. It’s less the kiss than the choosing, really. Knowing that he’ll come to her for no other reason but indulge his affection, even while there are so many other things to do. That he thinks of her; has a need of her; wants to be near her. 

The clink of caf mugs gives away that he's in the kitchen now. The noises feel part of a separate reality, though he’s not far at all from her cocoon of blankets and sheets. Then, more quiet.

She’s about to give up hope and submit herself to wallowing in the dumb sadness she conjured through this dumb situation of her own dumb making, when the empty side of the bed depresses suddenly. The rouse never goes over on him, but she pretends to be sleeping anyway. 

“Kitten?” 

He speaks softly but with his characteristic crisp delivery, so that the word is  _ kit-ten.  _ His tongue pops on the t’s, which never fails to make her think of how talented he is with that particular part of himself. 

The pet name makes her feel the exact same way his fingers do when they’re just parting their way through hers. Shot through with a jolt of excitement. It feels doubly intense now that he’s rescuing her from being alone. 

A hand lands on her shoulder first, the smell of citrus blooming off his skin. That discovery alone nearly breaks her sleeping act. She wants to press his palm to her lips so badly.

With those blessed hands he  brushes her hair aside and then plants a soft, almost hesitant kiss to the side of her neck. She could cry from the relief that floods into her from that single spot. Then comes another kiss, just above the first, so close to her earlobe that his nose bumps up against it. 

He’s capable of so much tenderness, when left unsupervised. 

The casual intimacy of  _ that _ , just his nose touching her ear, is what does her in. 

“You’re not fooling anybody,” he teases, misinterpreting her suddenly screwing her eyes shut as a slip in her “I’m still asleep” act, not the desperate attempt to keep from breaking into tears again that it is. 

Rose’s hands fly up to her face. She’s not  _ crying.  _ It’s just that tears are leaking out of her face and she has  _ no  _ idea where this is coming from, she’s just so happy and so sad at the same time and it’s all too much, now that he’s here for her, like he actually heard her thinking very loudly about wanting him. 

Hux pulls away in a split-second of surprise, then crowds back in so she’s forced onto her back, pulling her hands apart to uncover her face. Naked concern is written on his face, knitting his brow and lending him the tone that’s usually reserved for when more casual people say things like “it’s okay, you’re okay, I’m here”.

His own chosen words are not so sweet, but no less comforting. 

“What is this, hm? Did you lose a duel?” 

Rose shakes her head, screwing her lips together because she knows her voice is going to crack if she uses it, and then she’ll be crying for real, which she is currently - absolutely -  _ not doing _ . 

“Has the time finally come for you to deliver me the mortal blow?” He pecks a kiss down right between her eyes.

“Not everything is about  _ you,  _ you worm,” Rose sniffles, trying to look mean despite the tears that are trickling down to her hairline. 

“What, then?” He speaks into the side of her face. 

Hux does creepy things all the time: watches her sleep and sniffs her underwear and picks things out of her teeth with the tip of his monomolecular blade. So she’s grown to kind of enjoy the way he kisses at her tears, which he’s doing now, hands off her wrists to cradle her face. The action seems highly benign, by his standards of obsessive, loving surveillance.

His beard scratches her cheeks. Lips ghost against the fragile curve of her brow bone. It’s a very pleasant sensory experience, to which she finds herself easily submitting, even if just for the closeness it provides.   
  
“It’s nothing,” she croaks, and shakes her head. “Quit licking me.”

He does not. Finishes the job on the other side instead. “ _ Something _ made my wife cry. It’s not ‘nothing’”, he insists.

Hux will dig and dig until he’s extracted the entire truth, however painful the process. Never one to lie but eternally eager to cover up for her own emotions, Rose experiences this as refreshing — something she loves very much about him — and enlivening at the same time. Once he’s finished, and being so distracted by his ministrations she can’t cry any longer, she nudges him off her so she can sit up. 

Rose chews on what to say until it finally comes out, sounding lamer than she’d hoped.

“Just that old sick dream again. From when I was a kid. But I’m okay.” 

Their eyes meet. He considers her for a moment, as if summing up whether or not she could be hiding some worse truth. It seems she passes muster, whatever his hidden criteria may be. She just does her best to look sincere, while actually staring at the way the light catches in his pale eyelashes. So finely curled and thick, but invisible due to their shade. That keeps them a little secret, just for Rose. Just when he’s posed exactly right, light hitting him to where it’s all he can see.

"Good, then. No more tears. Not today." Hux declares imperiously. He reaches out to dry her face with his thumb. “You haven’t eaten, I assume."

Whether she’s eaten is his version of asking how is she and if she’s happy and if he can do anything at all to help her; he's a kitchen-lady's son, indeed. After all, it certainly wasn’t Brendol who would’ve encouraged his boy to take over such ‘wifely’ duties, or lent him the spirit of one as obsessed with small pleasures as he. 

Rose has too much to thank that mysterious girl for.

She's being offered a slice of nectarine practically the second she nods her head  _ yes  _ to his question. Rose eats it right out of Hux’s hand, the same thought passing between them like a physical object as she makes brief contact of her lips to his fingers:  _ put those in your mouth. _

She does not, despite wanting to, very badly, all the time. But the fruit is a nice consolation prize. He pops a piece of nectarine in his mouth too, diffusing the moment, and crosses his legs, still watching her from his side of the bed.

"Whether I ate has nothing to do with anything," she sniffs, while offering her palm for another piece. He hands her one off the plate he'd set on the bedside table.

Hux pulls a warm kind of half-smirk at this; the face of his that says he loves her best of all the things on all the worlds. "Then why do you always stop crying when I feed you?" 

Rose pauses. He has a point.

_ Okay. Focus. _

"Because I can't be sad when I'm eating fruit, and you happen to be smart enough to remember that." 

Years of her childhood were spent living off of dry rations when fresh food was stopped at an Order blockade; the weight of her casual reference comes to rest between them with all the menace of a sleeping dog. They live in the present and that isn’t the wrong thing to do and the fruit is so sweet and so good. 

She finally lets herself smile out loud, not just inside of her bitten cheeks. "So, lucky you."

“Yes,” he hums, nodding slowly, watching as a dribble of orangeish juice drips down Rose’s chin. 

“I agree. Lucky me.” 

Rose finishes the slice slowly, on purpose, trying to extend the peace of waking up and his being there for just a minute longer. Excitement is burning in his eyes, which is never a good sign. He looks like he’s barely holding back from telling her something.

  
  


She looks away from his face to take him in fully. As soon as she sees what state he’s in, how she hasn’t already done that, she has  _ no idea.  _ It’s like missing the fact that your buddy suddenly doesn’t have arms.

Hux’s hair is still unkempt. His facial hair is unbrushed. He’s in nothing but a wrinkled long-sleeved shirt and grey sleeping pants and socks and his wedding ring, worn on a thin chain of beskar steel, glints against the whitish fabric covering his chest. 

This way, he reminds her of the freshly peeled nectarine he's brought her on a yellow plate. So raw and tender it almost hurts to look directly at him, and not want to take a big bite out of that perfect sheen. In just pajamas, this man looks exactly like when she has him bare and laid out on his back.

The light catching on his ring is what breaks Rose fully from any trace of sleepiness. Hux  _ never  _ wears his wedding ring on the outside of his clothing like that, if he can help it. 

Perhaps she ought to be alarmed. If those are the same clothes he fell asleep in, and which he therefore went downstairs in, the man currently in her bed is not her husband but a very clever look-alike and she needs to grab one of the underbed knives ASAP. 

“Why are you naked?” Her face pinches with the full confusion he must know he’s due. Hux wears his turtleneck and overcoat to work and the market and the  _ beach _ . 

"A new ticket came in. Early.” He gives her another piece of nectarine, rolling his eyes as he names the customer. “Sleemos —  _ actual  _ sleemos, I’m not just saying that. They would have kept ringing and woken you up if I didn’t go down with a blaster and threaten their necks.” 

“Oh.” She blinks. The image of Hux negotiating with a gang of space-pirates at the asscrack of dawn is one she’s sorry she missed. 

“You should have woken me up.” Rose hastens to lick her pinky and the side of her hand, to catch some juice before it drips too far up her arm,. She savors the look she feels him giving her, despite not looking directly at him at all. 

“Those guys like me.” 

( _ Like,  _ here, meaning that sleemos always take pains to be polite to her, who looks like an innocent shop wife. Until she slides out from under their ship in her greasy coveralls to let them know just how badly they screwed themselves over and how much she’s going to charge to fix it.)

He makes a low noise of dark humor, but doesn’t poke that subject further yet. 

“I figured I ought not. You were sleeping with your arm up, like this — ” he demonstrates how she was positioned, completely serious, like the subject of her own sleeping beauty is a topic he’ll debate her on if necessary. “Too pretty.  _ Sleemos  _ do not get to look at you.” 

“You could have just upcharged them for the privilege,” she counters, but he’s quicker with a  _ tsk  _ and a look like  _ do you know who I am? Am I a joke to you?  _

“We charge appropriately for your time, which  _ includes  _ the cost of their filthy gaze occasionally touching upon you. As heinous a thought as that is.” 

“Uh-huh.” She motions for the last slice of nectarine, which he relinquishes to her like a royal gift. 

“I think you’re just getting too good at being a thief.  _ How  _ much did you charge Poe for his last sub-engine flush?” 

(Commander Dameron never checks his repair bills, just expenses them wholesale to his Collective account and moves on with ruining each starcraft in newer, more interesting ways).

“Twenty-seven thousand.” 

She doesn’t need to look over to know that the smile curling Hux’s lips is curdled milk and he is so very pleased with himself. 

“Disgusting.” She shakes her head in mock disbelief but secretly delights in getting Hux to recount their spoils. Poe  _ had _ crashed in and demanded service within the hour. And  _ was  _ responsible for the braindead attack strategy which led to the loss of the Cobalt Hammer and the rest of Rose’s friends in the squadron. 

“I think you’re getting too good at being a thief, man.” 

She’s got an idea, laying here with him so nice and mellow — his leaking intentions notwithstanding. 

It involves taking one of his sock feet in hand and pulling on it to bring the leg towards her. He allows this, a curious line forming between his brows.

“That’s a compliment,  _ wife _ . In my next life, I’m stealing everything back from your filthy Resistance.” 

Taking advantage of the looseness of his pajama pants, said wife pulls up the fabric to uncover Hux’s cybernetic leg. It works rather like its fleshy twin, though it’s constructed not of white skin and orange hair but of smooth black sili-steel; it’s connected to his nervous system, so he walks and runs and kicks her with it like a flesh leg. Installation had been a  _ bitch,  _ to make a very long story very short, but it had all been worth it _. _

The leg is constructed of thin black rods woven into a cage shaped like his lost shin, sleek pylons for structure inside, and attaches to an implanted port in his thigh. He switches off the magnetic connection when removing the limb at night, or before a shower, or if he wants to hit someone with it. 

(The last time he did that, it was to prove to an equally-plastered Ben Solo that, in his words, “the only fake thing about me now is  _ THIS — ”) _ .

Hux caves in to her touch, angling the leg so she can easily inspect his lately problematic ankle, looking for any improvement since she fiddled with it night before last. It’s making an odd noise when he walks. She thinks it might be a stripped screw, but needs to remove one to see if the oil she applied the other night didn’t help.

“Hey, gimme the, uh, the — ” Rose snaps her fingers as she tries to conjure an idea of which tools he has within reach on the night table, all of the names escaping her. He smoothly hands her a multitool before she can finish trying to find the word. 

She gets right to work, digging into the ball-joint component while he places the near hand on her head and lightly strokes her hair. 

“So what’d they bring in? You seem pretty jazzed, despite looking so un-made up.” 

“Ah, right — A YT-2550, as it happens.” 

He’s making it sound like there’s something to be excited about, here. Rose is convinced he has the model wrong and shoots him a look saying so. 

2550’s were manufactured for only a few years, directly following the victory at Endor, but were cheap and freely available to so many newly-freed peoples that they’re one of the most common ships flying  _ still _ . Of Corellian make, the light freighter was designed to be highly modifiable, and so is always a pain in the ass to sort out mechanically. It‘s never good to see one of those stuttering down onto the landing pad. 

" Original build.  Un. Touched." The word splits in two under the weight of all the reverence in Hux's voice. 

_ That  _ would explain the excitement. 

She’s never seen a mint 2550 in her life; nobody has. Mechanics have been working off the same stolen diagram of the original build since time immemorial. It’s practically tradition to fix up your first one by yourself and want to quit the whole profession in the process. 

Rose's jaw drops. "That's impossible. Did you scan the Droid to make sure?"

"Did I scan the Droid — of course I  _ scanned the Droid.  _ I wouldn't waste our time otherwise. It’s  _ clean. _ " 

Rose's fingers are already itching to dig into the freighter's original wiring, to solve so many mysteries presented by years of dealing spacers' terrible patch jobs and mods. 

Instead, she’s working on this one beloved piece of machinery, which somehow never ceases to give her trouble. She’s always knelt in front of him and tinkering with it while he sits and scratches her scalp, like this. 

“Where did they find one of those _ ,  _ you think?”  She asks, covering for the flush that creeps over her cheeks when she glances up to catch him looking at her with an unreadable stare. 

Sometimes she thinks he worsens it at night in order to get them right back here in the morning. 

“I asked. They told me they found it through ‘a tear in the fabric of spacetime.’  _ You  _ will have to obtain the  _ real  _ answer, unfortunately. If there’s even one to be had, which I very much doubt.” 

“‘A tear in the fabric of spacetime’...” Rose repeats, a little reverently, trying to memorize the phrase. She collects heroic-sounding things like lucky pebbles in her pocket. “That’s kind of poetic. I like that. They can keep their secrets.”

Having unearthed one screw in his ankle joint and finding it stripped even further than before, she jams it back in and starts cranking to get it fixed back in its spot. A new pair of screws is in order, annoyingly expensive as they are for such tiny parts. His new leg is only a quarter finished and she’s got a few other more pressing projects to handle first, though, so the repair will have to do. 

“I’d punt  _ you  _ through a tear in the fabric of spacetime,” she continues. “Send you right back to the start, save us all so much grief. Except then I would be lonely so I’d hop in after you, probably…” 

He doesn’t have a response to her dumb joke at the ready, meaning he must be suddenly very preoccupied. When she looks up to make sure she’s not been too rough, something seems to have switched in Hux’s face. It’s broken from relative calm to — hungry _.  _

  
His hand begins running up the shape her body makes under the covers, climbing up the not-so-long length of her, and she would feel the slow drag of it through a blanket of duracrete.

_ Oh _ .

So he not only came in and kissed her and sat with her, but he  _ wants  _ her, too.

It makes her face feel even hotter, feeling his focus on her concentrated as if… 

  
  


… as if through a thermal oscillator. 

He never lost the capacity to destroy planets. 

But Hux is tamed now. The rabid cur is leashed to her; bound happily under her gentle authority. 

The screw-cap replaced, she hands the tool back to him and cannot resist taking a moment to admire her own work, heat of the moment pressing upon her or not. 

With the prosthetic limb comes the knowledge that Hux walks around all day bearing a permanent record of their relationship and his turn to Good. Her art literally keeps him standing. An oddly romantic business they stumbled into, this cybernetics thing. 

(He once asked if she found the whole business repulsive, having to bed a "half-droid", feel the metal against her perfect skin. She'd assured him in her sweetest way,  _ you're no droid, and no, bedding you is the furthest thing from repulsive,  _ and ran her finger along the crease of the port until he shivered and looked near to tears and pulled her to him with a possessive grateful fierceness.)

His other hand lands on her cheek again, caressing the soft skin there. She’s vaguely aware of his voice, saying, "my dear?"

Rose moons into his touch, dreamy with the sensation of being desired. "Hmm?"

He pushes her gently back to the pillow, then finally pulls down the blankets that were covering her for so long, and she feels like a present that’s finally being unwrapped. Her whole purpose is in being undone, and then beheld. 

She’s got little in the way of clothing keeping her skin away from him. Rose, as a rule, sleeps in a too-big sleeveless undershirt and one of the many pairs of black panties she owns in an attempt to feel more like an Adult Woman. Though this has been her uniform for hundreds of nights spent together, he tilts his head and inspects her body as if he’s seeing her for the very first time. 

His hand lands warm on her thigh, then runs up the stretch of pale skin to palm over the curve of her hip. When his fingertip meets the elastic of her panties, he slips it underneath the waistband and plays with the flimsy strip, teasing her. She's never wanted an article of clothing off her body as much as she wants this pair  _ gone. _

"Would you let me make you come?” he inquires, in a way that’s as drifty as Rose feels, in his distraction. For her part, she’s only tethered to the ground by his touch and the sounds his mouth makes. 

He knows she wants it. Never doesn't, really. He demands visceral flaying-opens of their quivering inner selves as a matter of course, of who he is; to be shy or coy or retreating was never in his nature, sexually or not. 

Unlike her reluctance to part with painful truths and half lies, Rose is ever-eager to expose more of her quivering body to him. It means she gets to be seen, and then gets to poke right back. 

"Aren't we busy today?" Her big eyes blink (blink blink) up at him. If she had much in the way of eyelashes she would be batting them, but the girl’s always frying them off by leaning too close to lit engines. 

His eyes snap up from trying to discern the shape of her tits under her shirt, to looking at her with something like a plea on his face.

"Yes. We’re very busy.” He moves to slot himself over her prone form, nudging her thighs apart gently so as to insert his narrow body between them. The warm weight of him propped over her is a handful of kindling; she’s a smoldering warning fire, liable to catch at any second. 

“Much to do... No time…” He continues agreeing, kissing at her cheeks, the corners of her sleepy-slow mouth. A wandering hand gropes at her breast, and he finds  _ that  _ a much more pleasing way of discovering it than trying to look from afar. 

"So maybe it's not such a good idea —” she sighs and arches up into his touch, “letting you get  _ distracted _ — "

A beat; it’s as if Hux needs opposition to make a conscious decision. Almost brattily, he reaches down and lifts her top, bunching the fabric all up at the neckline so she’s entirely exposed but for the valiant effort of her underwear. 

"But you never take long," he murmurs into her ear, a nipple already rolling in his creeping fingers like he'd done her pantyline. Her cool earlobe gets caught between his grazing front teeth and he nips down on the perfect skin. “And I want to make you feel good. Allow me.”

There's no real fight in her today: Rose found that out the second he began paying attention to her tits. She’s got none of her usual instinct to protest against his blunt statement of fact, nor to fend him off as he palms her and squeezes at her and does other things that are not kissing her  _ or  _ using his mouth for other useful purposes. 

(It's not her fault that there's blistering chemistry between them. Her body merely reacts appropriately to the stimuli it's presented. And she really likes when he alternates between those gentle rolling caresses and then roughly pinching her already tight nipples.)

Thus incapacitated to take over control of the encounter, Rose picks another technique out of the bag of tricks she uses to keep Hux tamed. She can’t stop the moving train, but she  _ can  _ redirect it at will. 

She grabs his wrist and brings it down to slip past her panties, showing him exactly how wet he's already made her. The first invasion is never any less exciting, especially when it’s his cold clever fingers. He does not hesitate a second before he drags the first digit up the length of her sex, as slowly as he possibly can. Technically desensitizing her by warming her up to touch, because she’ll scream and squirm at his next ministrations if he doesn’t, but also to be plain mean in the slowness of it. 

"Show me how quickly I come, then." She threatens, enjoying that his face is close enough to hers that she can use her lowest register voice; the one that causes the very shiver that runs up his spine now, uncasing him fully from his brittle exoskeleton to let out the lovemaker hiding underneath. 

He is very goal-oriented, and works well under duress, so the threat is like a siren call to all of the parts of him, not just the ones that want to crawl up inside of her pussy and live there forever. The single digit is joined by two others in feeling her up, slipping between her folds with the ease afforded by her slick arousal. 

Before she can think of something else that’s sexy and powerful to say in between the mewling sighs he’s already extracting from her, he does what she’s surprised to realize neither of them had thought to yet: he presses his lips to hers. 

It must be in consolation because he takes away his fingers then, replacing their mourned absence with a tongue invading her mouth, his teeth nipping at her lower lip. But it’s just the one long, firm kiss and then he breaks  _ that,  _ too, and Rose could cry, but he only moves away from her so he can sit up and yank his shirt over his head and toss it aside. 

The necklace with his ring rests against the pink of his flat, faintly muscled chest. Sometimes he removes it for sex, sometimes he doesn’t. She likes when it stays on.

So it does now. That may be because he doesn’t want to be bothered with it; he’s not bothering with removing any of the rest of his clothing, at least, leaving Rose wanting to paw at his pantline like he’d done with hers. 

Hux crowds back onto her, a line of heat sealing their bodies together, kissing her soundly now that he’d been reminded of the idea. With the kiss he winds his supporting arm around her neck and in one practiced motion flips their positions, so he’s on his back and she’s perched on top of his slimmer form, her thighs enveloping his hips, legs tucked up along his so her foot brushes his metal leg. 

“Oh,” he says, when they break apart so Rose can settle her legs. He looks confused, through the haze in his eyes, in the general direction of her tits. She has no idea what’s the matter until he’s tugging on her forgotten top off too, freeing her of the fabric bunched up in her armpits. 

He makes her heart swell too big with how much he loves her, how plainly and worshipfully and almost pathetically. 

_ Almost.  _ He’s pinching her other nipple now, right up until the point it’s about to start hurting, and when she plunges down to kiss him hard in retaliation he only stops to position his other arm to pin her against him, so she can’t squirm away again even if she wanted to. 

“Dawdler,” she manages to bite out in the middle of her attempt to pry his mouth all the way open so she can lick his teeth or choke him with her tongue or suck out his organs. Licking tears and picking teeth is nothing compared to the things the monster in her gut demands when he’s become this vulnerable, offered-up version of himself. “I told you— ” 

She cuts herself off with a noise that’s a mix of startled yelp and a filthy moan when he replaces the fingers over her clit, getting to the point of proving to her that she is nothing but a button that only needs pressing in the exact right way to turn her into a mess of human jelly and pure need. 

They learned by happy accident this no-fail method of getting her off; the particular position of his fingers and their placement, so each rhythmic rub against the most-sensitive nub with just his pointer is multiplied when the other three massage against her subdermal nerves. 

From first contact he’s building her impending orgasm, no fumbling or too-hard jabs that knock her out of it, and at a pace that measures just under the thin membrane separating pleasure from outright pain. Each stroke builds the tension that breaks like waves down her thighs, curling her toes.

There’s surprising strength in the lean arm that’s holding her down; she tests against it, desperate for any kind of room in which to thrash out a measure of relief to balance the assault on her clit, and he responds instantaneously, squishing her into him even harder. When his chest rises to catch a ragged over-excited breath, she rises too. 

“What? What did you tell me, kitten?” He breathes into her ear, her neck already damp with his exhalations, and in response she releases a breath she was swallowing out of pride, which emerges from some deep part of herself with a sound that is more animal than girl. 

He shakes his head, readjusting his hold on her. He’s so calm, only breathing hard between kisses so forceful it’s unclear whether  _ she  _ wants to suck  _ his  _ face off or vice versa. His sturdiness feels like something Rose can launch her chaos off of. 

“Use your  _ words,”  _ he prompts her, picking up the pace of his rubbing fingers. The command and his pace and the clenching fire that’s overtaking her cunt and her belly and her thighs are too much, almost too much — 

She  _ can’t _ . Can’t talk, that is. The whine coming out of her mouth is indicative of as much, and of how close she is. She barely manages an “I’m gonna...” 

“You’re going to…” He’s in a  _ mood _ today, and she’s riding it, she likes it, he’s also about to give her an orgasm so he could say just about anything and she would clench her pussy around the way his words are shaped, the stupid awful Imperial accent driving her insane. 

“Am I going to make you come, pet? Am I showing you how quickly you unravel for me?” 

Commanding her in spoken words, his actions saying  _ I want you so badly I’ll come and get you and care for you in the best way I know how:  _ it takes him around three minutes, all told, to get her here.

Rose answers him “yes, stars, yes yes yes” and grinds out her climax atop the erection he’s been hiding from her. The sound escaping her arises from a hidden place inside her chest, a feminine little rumble instead of a high-pitched whine. 

As soon as she stops shaking, he retracts both of his arms, setting her free. He flops the arm that held her down across the bed and with the other, sucks the finger that got her off into his mouth. 

“Oh- _ kay,”  _ Rose grits out, laying on him a bit longer while she catches her breath, listening to the thud of his heart and the sound of him tasting her. The arm that was useless on the bed floats up, his hand resting lovingly cupped against her ass. “There’s time. There’s always time to cum.”

When he laughs, half the reason she does too is that he’s rocking her with the motion of his chest and she loves being bounced. She feels like putty, a handful of stuff Hux could do anything with. 

He hasn’t gained an ounce of body fat since she met him, but he’s well-muscled for someone with such a high metabolism; he makes an excellent pillow, despite the lean physique which first attracted her to him. She shifts her position slightly to sit back on his thighs, now that she’s become aware of her knees yelling at her and the way she’s making a mess on his pants. Also? 

He’s rock-hard, and she wants to touch. 

“You wanna get off?” She asks blithely, sucking her lips into her mouth in concentration on the task she sets herself to: using her fingertips to stroke his erection over the wetted fabric. It takes all of her self-discipline to resist the urge to wrap her small hand around him, to feel how hard he is for her, to slip under his pants and feel the velvety skin and stroke over his length and extract some delicious noises out of him, like he just got to do with her _.  _

“You could fuck me real fast. Or I could — ” she considers the object in question and smiles, feeling smart because the concept of sucking dick suddenly occurs to her as if she’s the first person on earth to ever consider it, “actually, I’ll just — ” 

Hux catches her before she can duck her head down and she whines at the injustice of it. Her restraint crumbles and she grips his cock in her smaller hand, over the fabric of his underwear. 

“We really  _ are  _ booked solid today, kitten,” he reminds her, looking like he’s getting some sick pleasure out of denying himself a blowjob. 

Rose is undeterred; her hand remains in place. She squeezes him extra hard and he swats her ass in response. She tries again, cooing at him, cracking a smile halfway through the line even though she’s mad she can’t taste him yet. 

“You can think of me as your lil’ pleasure droid if you need to, it’s okay.” 

“That was  _ one. Time _ .” he snaps back, trying to be ominous despite the smell of pussy on the finger which he’s poking, sternly, where he’d kissed her before. Right between the eyes. “You’re not hearing any more of my stories. You’re done.” 

“You mean — ” she’s laughing, “oh  _ no _ , you mean I never have to hear about the First Order ever again?” 

He pushes her hand off his cock and her clinging body gently to the side so he can begin the long process of getting up, a haughty expression on his face. He sneers over even when she follows up the tease with a genuine question: “you’re good? For real?” 

He’s sat on the edge of the bed, looking over his shoulder so the angle of his face reveals how beautiful its structure is, how strangely delicate. 

“Quite fine.” A sharp nod, and he glances away for a second before looking back at her, expression softened. “I’d rather take my time, when I  _ have  _ time.” 

Rose sits up too, stretching her arms over her head, and feels victorious when, as if magnetically attracted, his hand flies straight back to one of her breasts. He finally has the decency to look properly regretful, now that he can’t play with them, his mouth all twisted into the closed-lip grimace that is one of his trademark faces. 

“Of course... there will be time tonight.” He finishes. He’s so weak. He never stood a chance against her, not even when he was big and bad and wore shoulder pads and a greatcoat to show just how big and bad he was. 

“Obviously there will be,” she says, like it’s silly he even has to say so. She smiles fondly at him when really she’d like to giggle in his face, but if she’s too mean he’ll stay hard and that won’t make him any fun to deal with either. His erection has already deflated some. 

She scoots close enough to trace his jawline from the ear down, feeling how his beard has a day’s worth of overgrowth beyond his usual trim line. He’s made a kind of peace with the beard situation, and that peace relies mostly on his keeping it religiously trimmed up and even-looking, just to salvage what mess he thinks the hair makes of his appearance. 

“You look unkempt. Do you need help shaving, too?” 

He says  _ no  _ like a snot but really means  _ yes _ , because in the end she joins him in the ‘fresher anyway. Rose sits his naked butt down on the tiled bench built into the wall and washes his hair with the hand-held showerhead while he breathes through the transition between legged and not-legged and back again that a quick, casual shower represents for him. 

He once described it to her like this:  _ It’s like you have a leg, right — your brain just knows what it is to have two legs. And then in the next instant you don’t have one, you’ve got the one and your brain has to suddenly know that and the stump leg. And then you’ve got the leg back again…  _

She can’t imagine. She’s tried, though. 

His head is bent forward while she rinses his ginger hair, and he’s so still it seems like he’s asleep — which is entirely possible, what with his pattern of sleeping in the worst imaginable spots at the stupidest imaginable times. But his hand squeezes her thigh as tight as ever and when she finishes with the wash, he looks up at her with grateful rosewater eyes.

(Or is that just plain smugness that she's assigning humanity to?)

Once they’re both showered, Hux wraps a towel around his hips and sits back down on the tile bench for Rose to trim up his beard. 

At first he could not imagine trusting anybody with this sacred personal routine. It’s a miracle he does now, partially because Rose insists on using an old-fashioned straight-razor when many superior, and safer, options exist. 

Those options don’t allow for the rich lather of shaving soap, though, or for the need of two hands instead of one to get the skin taut, or the intimate closeness required to achieve the same precise lines. 

He also firmly believes in her right as his wife to terminate his life at her own convenience. It seems a favor to her to keep her in opportunities to spring such attempts on him, without arousing suspicion beforehand. 

Her fingers come up under his chin to tilt it this way and that while the razor scrapes slowly, carefully, at the skin of his neck and jawline, perfecting the line of his now-longtime beard. His eyes rest on her, at times burning, others cool and far-off. Neither of them speak, or scarcely breathe. Rose’s shoulders ache with the unnatural position but it’s a good ache, one she puts up with happily. 

His hand, on her knee, weighs ten thousand pounds. When she gets to certain parts of his neck she can feel his pulse and it’s thrumming like a bunny heart, fast and afraid by nature. 

Instinctively she stops for a second and wraps a warm palm around the back of his neck. Maybe it soothes him or maybe the shaving being dragged out that much longer drives him blind with rage, she has no way of knowing. 

Until he smiles, seeming to understand, and says “it’s alright”, which means “I’m okay”, which means “this very scenario was once a nightmare, but now with you it is a daydream that I’m living”.

So she continues with the Very Important task at hand, until he is neat and trim and clean again. He rinses his face and pats on aftershave that makes him smell of leather and night flowers. When Rose does this menial task her keen hands make it go by quickly; she never leaves razor burn or stray hairs or a nick in his sensitive skin. 

It is a talent she comes by naturally. 

— 

When Hux was only messaging her precious First Order secrets with his dick in his hand and a sense of doom clouding his spirit, he could not have dreamed of this state of marital bliss. It would have taken him out of the moment, with its inherent unreality. 

_ Him,  _ for one,  _ married?  _

No. Impossible.

And suffice it to say, being married off to a First Order general was Rose’s actual worst nightmare for... most of her life. It was a story told to little Haysian girls who misbehaved:  _ remember the naughty little princess whose father married her away? She was sent to the Empire’s biggest flagship, swallowed up whole, never to be seen again... _

She may have glanced at an x-rated novel or two starring a girl from a hovel world and her haughty Coreworld price, but that was fantasy. 

In real life, the Order took  _ everything  _ from her. It was full of unfeeling evil warlords who would stop at nothing to do the worst to everyone in the galaxy, and she would give every bit of herself to the cause of stopping them and stopping the endless war cycle in the Galaxy.

But the stories were to prove a useful guide for her life to come, it would turn out.    
  
(Paige always said that Rose was going to find her own way through life, no matter what  _ anyone  _ said.) 

It works between them — happened at all, in fact — because Rose stumbled upon Hux when he was a big, mean, neutered general in command of this doomed army, and bit the hell out of his finger. 

When her teeth sank down into his gloved hand, instead of hitting unfeeling metal, he was soft flesh; he tasted unmistakably of human blood.  _ That _ , unexpectedly, intrigued her. She hadn’t considered the living reality of the fact that the big mean warlords might be human too, under all of the death which they wore like armor around their souls. 

This was the biggest intrigue she'd ever encountered and even after everything, it began to bite at her ankles. It bothered her when she was asleep healing from her Crait injuries, and then when she was assigned busy work on base, and when she began sharing messages with a First Order mole who’d lately targeted  _ her,  _ for some reason, to be their unwitting handler. 

It took Rose a month to figure out that said spy was General Hux, which in hindsight made her feel stupid for being so long on the uptake. 

Who else would seek  _ her  _ out specifically in order to feed her information only a high-ranking official could possibly know? She was suspicious at first that he was trying to lure her out so as to kill her himself. Of course he wanted to put her in harm’s way, in the best way he knew how; she’d bitten him in front of all his troops.

Hux never outright confirmed nor denied her bold claim of his identity, despite assurances of their encrypted, unmonitored connection. She began to read his messages in that sneering Imperial accent anyway. 

Relations between them were rocky at first, but his intel was spot-on. Rose began to forget about her fear that he wanted her dead at his own hand. Or rather, she reassured herself that despite his training and high-born breeding and towering stature, she had thighs of steel and better blaster skills than ever before and therefore could not be knocked down by anybody, God or the government or General Hux included. She had no reason to fear him. 

Instead she tried to, but could not, fathom  _ why  _ he would be doing this, other than out of an enormous sense of cowardice or unimaginable pettiness. Maybe both. Either way, she half-respected him for it, and half-reviled him still. 

An odd balance was struck. 

Then a rapport. Rose was always inclined towards geniality, and it was obvious he’d never experienced such a relationship in his life. He was also hermetically sealed away in some flagship; he couldn’t get to her. So she let it happen. Her loneliness let it happen. His creepy insistence on asking her about her day let it happen. 

Out of that came, organically enough, a friendship. Of a kind. 

And fascination. He was turning to the right side, yes, but from the great depths of human cruelty. He’d built a  _ planet-sized superlaser,  _ for stars’ sake, and then murdered a  _ bunch  _ of people with it. Could someone like that go on to live a normal life, after everything? 

Common sense screamed  _ NO, DUH, OBVIOUSLY,  _ but her soul and her ironclad “saving what we love” personal philosophy stood in the way of that being the simple, straightforward answer. 

And she’d always had stars lodged in her eyes. A too-big place in her heart for misfit wandering types. 

— 

It works because of who she is. And because she came to know, through dumb luck and awful circumstance and sheer force of will, who he is, too. 

— 

For his part, Hux could not dislodge the image of the spitfire girl who would take his finger into her mouth and show him exactly what the Resistance was capable of. She’d survived him, bested him, and stayed lodged in his mind like a splinter. Sepsis would set in quietly, spreading from blood to bone to muscle to brain, until he found himself genuinely moved by the memory of the gesture, of her fighting spirit and her beauty and his all-consuming, bone-deep loneliness.

— 

It went like this: Crait happened. A wizard wiped the floor with Kylo Ren and then disappeared off of the salted earth right after they’d spent hundreds of thousands of credits worth of ammunition and men and transport operations and fuel on the battle. 

So Hux sat in his chambers that night (“night” clocking in one eight-hour stimtab dose  _ after _ the humiliating end of the engagement on Crait) and unbuttoned his shirt and had a long pull of whiskey, then another, and a good long think. 

He thought very long and very hard and in the end all he could declare to himself to be absolutely true was that his finger hurt because the girl bit it, and he was intrigued by her, and was absolutely inevitable that the First Order was going to lose this war.

He also wanted to live. A Hux is bred for nothing if not obstinate survival. 

At that point his idea was to escape to the Outer Rim and take on a new identity, disappear forever into obscurity with his cat and a collection of literature and the whole concept of “personal freedom” to explore. 

Or, that failing, he would go into hiding and re-emerge in a few years as the head of the inevitable faction of idealists still aligned with the First Order. Under his hand they would do it  _ right _ . They would form the perfect organization, capable of efficient governance and ruthless takeovers and actually enacting the peace-making measures that had been a founding ideal of theirs once, (what feels like) long ago. 

There would be no wasting time chasing after Jedi girls. No building of pointless throne rooms, nor excusing the Supreme Leader from political duties in favor of long, extraneous quests to magical realms with “just the boys” (meaning his Knights). 

It would be glorious. Everything he’d ever dreamed of. 

After his third three-finger glass, Hux had an idea that felt absolutely magnificent. On par with his idea to recreate the First Order but Good, This Time. 

He invented the concept of drunk cyber-stalking the stranger that invaded one’s Dreadnought and bit one’s finger and survived one’s order of execution just to scurry off in order to fight him another day. 

It was not difficult, because he was a general of the First Order and  _ some  _ creatures out there respected the title and the planet-destroying power that came with it, even through an encrypted connection. 

He’s also quite adept at seeking forbidden information; it’s a skill he honed very carefully during his years in the Imperial academy. 

Rose Tico was her name, and she was a little rebel girl from Hays Minor who destroyed precious Ore Diggers there and had been under an Arrest On Sight order ever since that unfortunate incident. It was lucky indeed for her that she escaped him the first time; he would not allow the second to end so happily for her.

After another glass of whiskey, of which he was soon going to run out and be very cross for, he’d obtained her personal code.

This precious bit of information was enough to send a bounty hunter after her. To place a hefty sum on her head. To track her down himself so as to go and end her life with his bare hands for having the audacity to snap him out of the hold the Order had kept on him for over a decade. 

But instead of doing any of those logical things, Hux was drunk and horny and palming himself over his pants with his bitten hand and he decided right then not to do anything at all, because he knew he’d absolutely fuck it up, whatever he did. 

He had to tread carefully with this one. It would be his cleverest ruse yet, to outlive his crimes in the Order and go on existing, somehow, nevermind the mind boggling audacity of hoping  _ she  _ would join him for any kind of future excursions. On that off chance, though, he couldn’t afford a misstep early in the game. 

Of course his living wasn’t the  _ real _ plan at all, he was sure he was going to die any day now, but he’d also been sure of the same for roughly the past decade of his life. It didn’t hurt to fantasize. 

Besides, he'd have to kill her on sight if he ever encountered her again, and he didn't relish the thought of watching that spirit drain from her eyes right in front of him. 

So it happened that on one of the worst, longest nights of Hux’s life, in which he lost many men and much money and all remaining respect for the Supreme Leader and the army which he purported to command, the  _ very night  _ when Phasma breathed her bitter last, he was jerking himself off to the thought of rebel teeth and gnashing rebel mouth and brown eyes flashing with hate. 

When he finished, messily, he sat imagining for a moment what it would be like if she kicked him to the ground and held him there under her feet and then sat on his face — ostensibly against his will, but his desire for it burning. He had never asked for a woman to do that to him because he trusted nobody and would have been dead long ago if he was in the habit of putting himself in such compromising positions _.  _ It was a much-beloved fantasy, however, and she slipped so easily into the role of his master… 

He indulged himself further. Wondered: would her cunt taste sweet? Or musky? Or just like skin, nothing much at all? 

He'd only ever tasted one or two before. Never any time for getting the woman off, only  _ him, _ so she could leave that much faster. How his father had enjoyed a lifetime of such servicing, Hux would never understand.

She probably, blessedly, didn't shave, so there would be slick dark curls precluding the dripping prize beneath. She wouldn't consider such frivolities as  _ shaving  _ in her busy life of being Rebel scum, and besides; she was a woman and would look like a woman, unburdened by the industry standards of the flesh trade. 

He was getting hard again. Inconvenient. He ignored his erection and kept contemplating, building an image of an unreal woman in his mind that he would never smell nor taste nor touch but very much  _ wanted  _ to, despite every drilled-in inclination of his to desire the opposite. 

He realized in his inebriation that whenever he drank, his mind would drift over to this country of longing for pussy with every cell in his body, and never truly alleviating himself of that ache. Every part of him desired a safe home and place for respite and a person who would have the capability of producing breathy sighs at the touch of his mouth, who would ignore his latent desire so he might be allowed to serve her over himself. 

This was a problem. Hux was smart but not smart enough to think his way out of this conundrum: absolutely needing to taste the cunt of a woman whom he had just ordered to death, and to whose precious cause he had dedicated his entire life to laying waste.  _ Without  _ coercing her, turning himself into his father in the process.

She was free and scurrying around and he wanted her so badly, but he knew that upon capture everything which made her so dazzling to him would be dimmed. She had to come to him, to accept him herself, of her own volition, if he was to have her in any meaningful way at all. 

It felt like an impossible ask. He knew deep down what he had to do in order to accomplish this task; he just needed a moment to wrap his brain around the finality of choosing to go  _ that  _ way. To completely change his life and risk it all in the process, all in chase of — what? 

The chance at living a life he’d never gotten to choose for himself? Weak. It was the weakness in him speaking. It was the pathetic man inside who was tired of being slammed to floors and consoles and desks and ignored and shuffled around. 

He couldn’t even walk himself through this entire thought process, it was so absurd. But there was no other way to accomplish what he needed to in order to get where he wanted to be, and Hux is nothing but a fulfiller of goals, no matter how ridiculous. 

Hux would not contact Rose for a couple of months yet. This problem of their situation was simply too great to think over in a mere night or two. 

Ren was busy and busying everyone in his new Supreme Leadership, too. He created a new throne room, because that's what all Supreme Leaders need first, then redecorated the mess halls and rearranged the staffing on the flagships, and got right down to the business of draining their coffers and ruining everything.

One of Ren's tasks was essentially cleaving Hux's balls off, what with his giving Pryde the rank of Allegiant General in Hux's place, forcing all of Hux’s orders to first go through the wrinkled old friend of Brendol's. 

He was still in command of technological innovation and reconnaissance, sure, but that title meant essentially nothing once the Order’s might began to focus heavily on rooting out the scraggly remains of the Resistance. 

And then once they began negotiating with a squadron, an  _ army,  _ of those blasted evil wizards, these ones all dressed up in red, he found it genuinely difficult to keep pulling a straight face in the war room. The whole thing was so offensively stupid. And Ren only let Hux design  _ one  _ big laser, and it wasn’t even different from the others he’d already built, and it was all pointless and dumb anyway and he hated this Final Order the most of anything he’d ever hated in his entire life.

The Sith Eternal were the final straw on the redheaded camel’s back, so to speak. The last of a long line of indignities that Hux put up with for the good of the cause, of the Order, of the hope that soon the Galaxy would bend the knee to it's rightful, capable rulers. 

He knew on Crait that they would lose, and here he was: absolutely correct about something,  _ finally.  _ It was time for him to have his last bit of fun before saying "good night" to all of this wretched mess.

—

Cock in hand, buzzing with too much energy and pent-up emotions, he finally messaged her. 

(The drunk fantasy had been fleshed out from wondering how she smelled to knowing it would be sweet and hearing her soft low voice and unbuttoning her tight teal uniform and winding her out-of-regs little floppy fringe curls around his finger and kissing her mouth and laying her down and slipping the finger she bit inside of her and tasting her off of that. But no further.).

To his immense surprise and delight, she did not immediately delete the encrypted message, but began to correspond with him, once it was proven that the intel he was providing was real and useful. This Tico girl was smart, a fact which he knew and used to his advantage. She wouldn't let him go so easily, once she knew there was more precious information to dig out of him.

So it went. His treasonous new hobby became one of the few things he looked forward to, other than fantasizing about his own death; he fed bits of information to Tico and felt a bit lighter each time he did it. 

He was a particular connisseur of foiling bombings on small planets, fancying she would appreciate that, not acknowledging the fact that he was doing it for the kid in him who had survived shelling, too. 

He wasn’t sure if their communication was being monitored or archived, or rather was sure that it would be, so he avoided mention of anything personal. Certainly she would not respond well to being hit on via anonymous message, anyway, nor would she like it any more if she knew who he was. They communicated mostly via bare-bones messages and randomly dropped coordinates of planned attacks and his sending full data chips to their neutral location for her retrieval.

Hux was, of course, in his own head about it the whole time, enjoying getting off on ruining his own organization and on thinking about her handcuffed and kneeling before him. 

If he knew anything of the subject in his life he would have been able to tell that he had fallen hopelessly in love with the girl, just like Ren fell for the scavenger, but he didn’t. 

He just thought himself healthily bedeviled with the conductor of his downfall, and liked that he was using her to get back at the people who had stolen his life thus far. Nothing more complicated than that.

It was even the same breed of consumptive love as Kylo Ren’s, born both of his fury at the life he’d built in darkness and wanted desperately to quit, and his obsession with a girl strong enough to stand up to him at his bullish worst, then keep on being bright.  _ Even _ when he did his very best to quash her. 

Hux would not know it as love for quite some time, but before he could name it that it would be called  _ begrudging respect  _ and  _ admiration  _ and  _ obsession  _ and  _ reprehensibly strong sexual interest _ .

—

A break came roughly six months into this odd tango. 

It was a mere slip of his proverbial tongue; he mentioned that Pryde had organized an airstrike on a Resistance-sympathetic colony for his birthday. 

_ “As a, shall we say, little present,”  _ the bastard had drawled during the morning roll call, and Hux had felt his cowardly self smile and remark upon what a lovely gift that was.

She said: **_your birthday?_ **

The topic of his identity had been poked at, but he held fast. Mentioned Millicent once or twice but few souls, even aboard Hux’s ship, knew about the cat anyway. 

This would be another slip of his cover, but he couldn’t take back having said what he said. They needed to know the date of the attack, after all. 

He said:  **_August 16._ **

He figured she would never know it was him, anyway, and the tragedy of that was fuel for Hux’s fire too. He could imagine all he wanted, and never have to confront the reality of anything, and also feel terrible for himself about the life he could have lived if things had been very, very different _.  _ It was the ideal situation, if it weren’t for all of the useless ceaseless _ yearning.  _

She said:  **_Copy_ **

She said:  **_happy early bday??_ **

The next day, she pinged him unexpectedly. 

She said:  **_This is General Hux, isn’t it?_ **

He’d lain awake preparing for this moment since he sent the first message, but it made his stomach sink to actually read the words coming from her. 

He responded:  **_I will not reveal such information, especially on a monitored line. I am not an idiot._ **

She said:  **_Suit yourself_ **

She said:  **_not monitored, tho! Full encryption. I self-report._ **

This second revelation landed in his gut with the heavy implications that —  _ huh _ . They could just say anything to each other, First Order to Resistance, person to person, and he really  _ was  _ turning into Ren because he imagined immediately how one could turn the heart of another through insistently messaging her alone. But he hadn’t the words to even begin. There  _ were  _ none, really. He was not taught to speak in the language of tender, open-hearted persuasion.

His reward for now being an active, operating traitor, for officially having his neck on the line, was their dynamic immediately shifted; going from cold and stilted, to the warmth of their extremely odd friendship. He remained cagey about his identity, because it seemed wiser than to not, but it seemed that her having some grasp on who he was made her more at ease in his digital “presence”. 

And there were even…  _ moments _ , between them. 

Moments such as:

She sent a blurry snap of a photo of himself on some propaganda poster he didn’t even remember signing off on. She was apparently emboldened to such a degree that she was willing to reveal she collected images of him.

She said **:** **_Soooooooo… no budget for new campaign pics, huh???_ **

He bit back **:** **_Color me unsurprised to find you Rebels rely on terribly outdated materials._ **

She said **:** **_You look like a weird evil baby with your face shaved. I’d grow a beard, if I were you._ **

And then, just days later, on the eve of the anniversary of his expulsion from womb to world:

She said:  **_happy 34th._ **

She said:  **_or should I say… happy PURR-thday?_ **

He responded:  **_No, you should not._ **

An hour later:  **_But. Thank you._ **

****

Later that day, when it was well past morning in the colony set to be sieged, reports flowed in that the attack went terribly.  _ As predicted _ . 

Hux sat in the command room and was taken to the floor with his face by means of the Force, instead of being victoriously washed in the metaphorical blood of the innocents. 

It made the floor-wiping feel a little different, though. The slice of agency behind it.

— 

Without her, he may have eventually turned, but the fact remains that pathogens do multiply faster in welcoming environments like stab wounds and gunshots and bite marks, and Hux felt like a human embodiment of all three in her wake. 

He’d been bitten by a rabid little rebel and ended up changed, if just the tiniest bit. He tried to mark this off as a mere physiological response; a bid to ensure his survival after the war. But that did no good, because in the end, he  _ wanted  _ to do it. He  _ wanted  _ to see the Order lose, after unleashing all of that mayhem for what would amount to an evil wizard’s family feud. And he knew he would die before he got the chance to see it play through, but he needed to have it happen anyway. 

He bent, in the end, towards justice. Did  _ better  _ than bend. Hux’s slow bleed of intelligence to Rose stopped a lot of innocent creatures dying; saved Poe and Finn and Chewie and the rest of the Resistance too. 

He himself "died" shortly after, without ceremony, shot like the traitor he was: like a dog, in a hallway, with a pair of her underwear in his greatcoat pocket and a beskar-thread undershirt stopping the blaster from actually finishing the job. 

— 

The underwear were a “final request” of his, made a few days before the one where he would, in fact, meet his first death. 

(He’d given her so many secrets she was a little shocked he hadn’t been taken out yet. Things must have been dire in the “Final” Order, that this treason was slipping by unpunished.) 

It was the only indication he’d given her that he was interested in this sort of thing; that he was even interested in other humans, or women, or… or potentially  _ her,  _ at all. 

Rose, after re-reading the message a dozen times to make sure she hadn't mistaken the request, was happy to trade a pair of panties for the good of the universe. She would have done it for free if he’d just out and asked nicely, but he wasn’t quite capable of that, at the time. She even decided to cum in them once before passing them on, because her heart is big and generous and fills with too many ideas when she gets bored and horny. 

By that point she was already imagining what it would be like to fuck him. It just felt like the thing to do while she had zero real-life romantic prospects, and would never meet the man anyway, and the story of their meeting was like something out of a holodrama; it didn’t help that it turned out tall men, red hair and sneering authority figures were  _ all  _ fertile grounds for her overactive erotic imagination. 

When she thought of him it was nothing too cozy, because Rose was hardened to crushes after Finn. She thought about sitting on his evil mouth and about having his fingers inside of her, mostly. What it would be like to have him speak in her ear with that low mocking tone he’d used on the  _ Supremacy.  _

The fantasies made her feel infinitely dirtier than sending her used underthings to a third-party collection point. 

— 

Somehow Hux got himself back to her, his handler, his dear little one, after his false execution. He was supernaturally good at saving his own skin; tied his own tourniquet and everything. Nobody knew how he showed up in the Resistance med-bay, having escaped the First Order with his blasted knee and collapsed lung, only that he did. Death itself could not stop him, once he set his eye on a prize

_Nothing,_ it seemed, could permanently kill Armitage Hux. Probably not even God. Palpatine and Pryde and Kylo and Brendol and so many others could attest to that.

His greedy grabby hands were held too tight on his twisted zest for life; for kicking around the universe, making trouble and bothering everyone by trying to set everything right, whatever he saw as “right”. 

—

It works because Hux also proved that he could not be kept from Rose’s side, as long as he was breathing. He could  _ not  _ be deterred from offering himself up to her altar. 

—

Maybe Rose’s whole problem — what led her into happy matrimony with a snarling hound turned sweet by her attentions —  _ really  _ began when she was very young. 

  
For as long as she could remember, each week Rose would go hand-in-hand with Paige and their Grandmother, their  _ bibi,  _ to go visit Grandpa. Like heading to the indoor market or the bathhouse, it was a sacred weekly tradition shared between the three of them that broke up the crushing monotony of life on a scraggy mining colony. 

_ Bobo  _ was interred inside the sealed mausoleum where most other Haysians chose to rest for eternity. It consisted of a single large room, mostly empty but for marked-up walls and long slim tables before them, and an altar at the head of the building. Each name etched on the wall was accompanied by their family’s bowl of hammered smelt on the table, which was kept full of little comforts — cigarras, socks, fringi cakes, paper money — to ensure that their loved ones wanted for nothing in death. 

This was among Rose’s favorite places as a child. Inside it was cool and dark and smelled of incense; and, as if to make up for entire lives spent on this rocky planet incapable of producing its own organic life, there were projected clips of off-planet flora playing on repeat over all of its walls. 

_ You live on a dead planet your entire life but here in your own death, is: life. Ha!  _ This seemed to say. As a little girl, though, Rose found it magical. She liked to run through the swirling digital colors, imagine herself in a place that was capable of all that blooming.

At the head of the mausoleum was the sanctuary, its shelves made of real, organic wood, where prayers were said and the many icons of the Haysians’ many gods were gathered to listen. Rose and Paige argued over which most deserved their offerings of a credit-coin each, while Etta Tico, head bowed in prayer, finished speaking in fond whispers with her long-dead husband. 

Once done, Etta shuffled over to the girls. She found them still debating the merits of each god, and the material benefits and good luck to be gained from offering their credit-coins. Paige liked Death’s wife, the shrouded maiden who listened to the pleas of those drawn close to her consort, while Rose preferred the cleverer wife of the clever trickster god. 

_ She  _ was depicted as a young woman, hooded modestly, with a beatific expression as she held a severed human arm in her embrace. 

Her husband had gone and stolen a trinket-box from the queen of the Underworld, so Death tore the god’s body in seven pieces and cast them all over his realm like so much garbage. The trickster’s wife marched right down into Hell and snatched the chunks back, her arms full of what was once her love. Every bit of him returned to her until the last one remained. That was his arm, for which she traded Death her golden wedding ring. 

When the trickster god was stitched back up with magic threads and a fine smelt needle, his wife held back that final limb for her own keeping. He needed to be reined in, she’d decided. Her husband’s body had become her ultimate prize; the arm, her new seal of matrimony. It was  _ hers _ . 

The trickster’s wife cradled that limb gently to her breast, so confident and happy and openly desirous of something so ugly. Rose had never seen anything like her. Just looking at the statue made her heart flutter. 

Haysians usually made offerings for her mercy when mine shafts collapsed or chunks of ore fell unexpectedly, hacking off parts of their fragile bodies, but Rose chose her simply because she wanted to  _ be  _ her. To be the one in possession of something so worthy of her most crushing, tender love. To not be embarrassed of the size and width of her desires, so often made small by the harshness of the life she was born into. 

“You can’t choose  _ her,”  _ Paige protested once, as Rose gave her characteristic contemplative smile. “She’s not the goddess of anything  _ we  _ need.” 

(How prophetically wrong  _ that  _ would turn out to be; Rose remembered those words bitterly after Paige died, when she felt like half her body had been cleaved off, and she had nothing to turn to but old whispered prayers and setting aside one bite from each meal to keep her sister fed in the afterlife). 

“My  _ girls,  _ there is no fighting in this place,” Etta cut in from behind her granddaughters, who swarmed to her with eager kisses. They came away giggling and smelling of her heavily perfumed powder, their quarrel on hold until Rose was reminded of the injustice dealt by her sister.

“Pae-pae says mine’s  _ wrong,  _ but I liiiiike her,” Rose immediately whined to her  _ bibi. She  _ felt safe enough with her to act younger than her big age of nine. Etta looked to the icon which Rose pointed out, and the very same faraway smile that her granddaughters would wear came across her weathered face. 

“You know, Rosie?” She turned to look at the littlest of the two girls, heart wrenching to see her moon face and big warm eyes and bigger trembling heart that promised a life full of nothing but easy bruising and easier ecstasies. When Etta winked and glowed with her cheekier grin, Rose returned the look, excited to be so validated by the attention. 

“I always liked the saints that were a little bad, too.” 

— 

Rose was the only one on base capable of helping him avoid the installation of a useless analog prosthetic. That was convenient enough an excuse to launch herself so recklessly into his orbit.

It was a cold fact that there were no other cybernetic-familiar engineers on Ajan Kloss, and fewer soldiers still who would stand to be around General Hux _.  _ So, his care and interrogation were gladly left by Poe to Rose. 

Hux was to be rehabilitated, then sent on a mission for the good of the Collective. A pardon would come after, as was the direction of the Collective’s mission of peacekeeping. 

When he was sick and one leg down, pre-port implant, in a medbay stretched too thin with too few painkillers, Rose went to visit him for the first time. She was petrified of what she would find, but she’d wanted to crawl into his bed even then, worn down by months of messaging and being curious and nursing a quiet flame of hope. Even if he was bloody and pulpy and gross. She was curious beyond reason. 

She’d opened the door and — there he was. Skinnier than she thought he'd be, and somehow more handsome, even with his injuries and while half doped-up. His leg was suspended up in a sling that hooked into the ceiling; it seemed like an alien appendage, the wrongness of the sight. Like he should be able to yank the whole thing off and say “ _ got you,  _ little rebel!” 

She didn’t listen to her base instincts. Stayed standing at the edge of his sickbed instead. 

While she was deciding what to do, he looked over her way. He didn’t recognize her at first, having not seen her since ordering her death, and asked, slurring, whether she was an angel or his mother finally come for him or the doctor with a kill shot? 

She said  _ no, dummy  _ to each option and he said  _ ah _ ,  _ so you’re here to watch me die...  _ And she said  _ in a way  _ and he said  _ then pull up a chair, you’re mocking me by standing there.  _

This is how it began between them, in earnest. 

Rose sat and bore quiet, steady witness to him in his worst state, and then his most vulnerable— while Hux, going against his better nature, offered her the closest company he was capable of, pulling her ever-closer as she edged herself all the way in. 

— 

All of the everything in between occured. 

—

He went through port-implantation surgery and the remapping trial, where he was dosed with a powerful psychedelic drug which allowed a neurodroid to connect his organic brain to his mechanical leg. 

It also served as a potent sort of truth serum. Herein would lie part one of his journey to the Pardon.

Under the blinking red eye of a cam-recorder, in a re-purposed supply closet which was useful for the sound insulation, Hux and Rose worked through pages and pages of inquiries on Hux’s vast critical First Order knowledge. They got nowhere on a quarter of them because Rose would look up into his overtly adoring face and stutter, and he’d do everything in his loopy power to get her to stumble again. 

Truth be told, the Collective had ordered Rose to do a war crime on Hux, or whatever a war crime is called when you’re the victor and it’s not war anymore. Interrogations obtained while under the drug were supposed to be invalid, owing to its tendency to backfire in bodies not undergoing legitimate limb renetworking. It crippled those who had gone under as strong and healthy as could be, reducing once rosy legs and arms to flopping dead appendages. 

It worked beautifully on Hux, though. He became an open, enthusiastic book, flipping through his terrible accomplishments as if she was supposed to be  _ impressed  _ by them. By him. 

It turned out that his personality, once stripped bare of the vestiges of power and the self-inhibition, was ruled by an obsession with order and a terribly accurate instinct for making Rose giggle with his overtly odd, out-there jokes. 

His mind barely functioned like a normal human’s; he was a kind of gear-head, stuck behind various forms of machinery, humans or gears forming the cogs; he sat there thinking of his own jokes just to entertain himself. Same as her. 

Horrifyingly: a lot of him was the same as her.

Rose confessed her sin as soon as he was conscious again, but it merely made him laugh out loud and ask if he’d said anything uncouth, which, at the time, she blushed to say she would  _ not  _ reveal. 

(He'd merely called her pretty and kept saying her name like ROSE TICO, booming out each syllable very carefully. It was his dumb way of trying to say  _ I love you please don't ever leave me again _ , but Rose wasn't well-versed enough to read that deep intent in him, and he wasn't well enough aware that he  _ could  _ love.)

—

Physical rehabilitation was arduous but made easier with bacta gel baths and compression socks and Hux’s iron will to be free of his accursed hospital room at his earliest possible opportunity. If it were up to him, he’d have been happy to stay forever in his wheelchair — nearly stabbing anyone’s hand that tried to push or steer him, shooting around corners at high speed, generally being the kind of enemy nobody would suspect until he pulled out his deadly weapon... 

But that kind of power was not to be his. Rose made that call on his behalf. 

She, meanwhile, waited impatiently for the day she could test his true mettle on their mission. 

(Inside, unbeknownst to her, she was waiting for him to appear in her adoring eyes as a glimmering hero. A man out of a Holodrama, turning towards her with the music swelling. Like Finn had, once. If he only became heroic, she could finally love him.) 

It came soon enough. The mission involved them extracting information from high society members on their ties to current weapons dealers, as well as stealing long-buried information from the half-bombed, abandoned Academy on Arkanis. 

Hux had dug up a vintage vial of Glitter from his father’s old desk to assist them in the process of the second arm of the assignment. It turned into a ransacking rather quickly after that, Glitter tearing down their usual walls of decorum and inbred desires to bow neatly to authority. 

(She’d sucked the purple grit off his pinky-tip, not breaking eye contact, and it was then that she could see what was in front of her since he was a skinny chicken in an ill-fitting hospital gown.) 

They then proceeded to explode the Academy, which they were expressly told  _ not  _ to do, but they both with perfect vision saw that such a place should not go on living in its state, useless for running a school and standing only as a monolith to Arkanis’ wounded pride. Neither trusted the Collective to this incredibly important task of burial.

(He’d held a Submachinegun out for her, the clip not a smooth arc of metal holding blaster bolts but much bulkier, like a bucket that was meant to feed in thousands of bolts. It was an invitation. Noticing that her eyes were bugging out, he’d smiled — beautifully, not meanly, in a way that made his countenance seem all warm and fun-scary — and practically sang, he was so pleased with himself, “paintball clips fit this model, beautifully enough”. 

The angels started singing their songs. Rose realized even then that it was not a gun he was offering but an engagement ring. If she accepted it, she would be bound forever to this life of gleefully tearing down the Empire and its descendant traces along the side of one of its ultimate scorned scions. There would be no other way for her. 

She accepted the outheld gun cautiously. 

Hux did not realize any of this, that he was now in her eyes a starry glimmery Somebody again. He merely turned and, with devastating accuracy, started pelting the painted face of his father in the portrait that hung in an untouched Great Hall of the Academy.) 

On their way  _ back _ to the Collective, they stopped by Canto Bight on a reliable tip, obtaining the key-fobs  —  and therefore, the highly private and valuable personal codes  —  of 86 individual bigwigs in the black market weapons trade. 

It was another rogue decision in a line of many, which began when Rose snuck onto the  _ Finalizer  _ with Finn and DJ in the first place. They both chafed following the direct command of a military in which neither quite trusted. 

—

Hux, to be more accurate, will  _ never  _ trust the Collective. It’s a foregone conclusion. He will align himself with whom he must in order to survive, and if his actions in this sorrowful life do any amount of good to anyone, it’s fine enough for him. 

But for Rose, the ill will began in earnest while Hux was still in physical therapy, when he was terrorizing everyone on base from his wheelchair — having found a new state of disturbing jolliness and overwhelming energy to occupy, now that his life wasn’t in constant mortal peril. 

The report on the New Civil War had just disseminated. Rose anonymously co-authored a good portion of it through her dozens of hours of interrogations with Hux, but still, she’d read the whole published piece and saw red and fled to — who else? Her unfortunate confidante, the one ear on the whole of Ajan Kloss that was obliged by law to turn her way, no matter what. 

She couldn’t explain it, but she flung his door open ready to tear something apart and it took just one look at his unperturbed but familiar face for her to burst out into the loudest, bitterest, most embarrassing tears of her entire life.    
  
There are no exact words for what she felt. It was a blend of grief and righteous anger and disbelief. What she came up with, to name the reason for “such a show” to a mortified Hux, is far less clear but a much more eloquent a summation of the matter:

“It was just an  _ EVIL WIZARD  _ and some  _ STUPID FAMILY  _ this  _ ENTIRE TIME?” _

_ — _

It became clear to the both of them, though it always  _ was  _ clear if either had ever thought to look around, that the other was the only person in the universe who understood what it was  _ like _ .

How it was to be a wholly logical but deeply convicted idealist cog in a greater, crushing machine, built to use death as a bargaining chip and running on unfairly bestowed Force magic. To dedicate their youth and time and energy, even their family members to the great Cause, in mere hopes of seeing the universe turned a better place… only to be thrown away in the event of their redundancy. 

They came to this feeling via two massively different journeys, with differing burdens and motivations and moral dilemmas. It just so happened that they discovered this raw sameness hiding in the nooks and crannies of both of their chests.

It felt better to know that there was someone else out there, walking around with something ugly like that living inside of them. 

—

These events all occurred, and many more. They stuck together through most of these. 

More importantly: during all of this commotion, without saying anything, or noticing much at all, they became indispensable parts of each others’ lives. Learned how to run missions together, suiting each others’ strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. Diffused into the blood of each others’ newly emerged post-War selves, impossible to separate.

They properly got to know each other and were both deeply shocked to realize that they  _ did  _ have chemistry and they  _ did  _ have a rapport, it wasn’t just in their heads. 

That is to say, they fell in love. Very hard and very fast. 

They  _ wanted  _ to be together. It was the strangest thing. There was nothing fully logical to say about it to the incredulous friends and coworkers who needed to know  _ why  _ Rose would do that to herself. 

They didn’t just need to be around each other because they’d been tossed together by fate and bound that way. They could simply choose to be. There was so much freedom and so much choice in this new life, of which they had been yet unaware. 

All at once, it was time to start going on and living. 

—

Finn had patiently sat and heard Rose explain her decision to leave the Collective base in favor of a permanent outpost assignment alongside Armitage Hux. When she was done he told her, his voice full of fondness and disappointment in equal measure, “Commander, you are the queen of incomprehensible life decisions. I really don’t know how this whole… uh,  _ thing _ works for you. But if he makes you happy? Shoot. Chase that.” 

— 

It does work.  _ Somehow.  _ Their whole “thing”. 

For many reasons. These include the fact that the straight-laced bucket of snipes and the relentlessly hopeful human embodiment of an enthusiastic but clammy handshake just so happen to get along fabulously. 

They find the same stupid things funny. Neither has encountered this in any other human before. One endures jabs from the other as if skinned in beskar, volleying back gleefully, and if they aren’t coming up with creative ways to insult each other, they’re talk talk talking about one of the other millions of things they have to lay out and argue over. 

One finds they couldn’t shut up around each other if they tried, even when their opinions couldn’t be more different — which is all the time. 

But in that lucky way of people who fit together like puzzle pieces, they nestle into each others’ gaps quite neatly. When the rare quiet descends, it’s a happy and harmonious one. 

Hux waves his hand at her hesitance to brand herself as anything more than a behind-the-scenes gearhead, and she reminds him of the goodness of soft and warm-hearted things. 

It works because Rose needs to be — not pursued, because she has her own life and goals and means of achieving those at her own pace, but... needed. Wanted. Desired. 

She needed to be sought after intensely, after putting herself out there for Finn in the biggest of possible ways and falling, romantically speaking, straight on her ass. Receiving friendly visits while she was in the medbay but always from groups, and then shoulder pats and assignments away from central command… 

That was one of the more painful experiences of her life. Rose puts  _ everything  _ into each action, her entire actual bleeding heart. If it’s not returned in kind the organ just lays out there, in the open, pattering pathetically as it roasts in the lonely sun.

She’d never regret saving Finn, but it did cement in her that need to be in control, to possess the power in the relationship — for real, not just handed over in chunks, with safewords attached. She would need to be worshiped, or have nothing at all. A sub-par love would not do. She would gladly spend all of her remaining days serving the galaxy, happily alone, before she would open her heart to another man who would not be hungry for her. 

— 

It works because they will always be a little bit afraid of each other, in their own ways. He knows how sharp the edge of her mind is; how brilliant, and how unassuming, so that nobody will ever know the true extent of her genius. In there hides a beast that craves power and dominion, things she has been denied all her life, and which he has been searching all his life on his knees to surrender up. 

She brought him down at his most towering, and the lingering shyness of an animal once bit will never leave Hux. It is good this way; ideal. He needs to be cowed, brought to heel and kept busy like a good, well-trained boy — not allowed to run free, obviously, since he tends to get a little  _ laser-y  _ when left to his own devices. 

He needs to serve something bigger than himself. It is an animal urge like hers, skittering in his chest, insatiable. The Order did quite well to stop that up, and then  _ that  _ was gone, so he had but one icon of revolution to devote his life to: his Rose. The one who was delivered to him, spitting and screaming. An angel. 

There is nothing he does not let her do to him. To give this all to her is his honor. It is what he was made to do. He is merely glad she responded to his first anonymous message, and let the rest take care of itself. 

—

Rose does not  _ fear  _ him in the same way he does her. She lives in exhilaration and awe of him, and what she knows he is capable of, the terrible and the wonderful. But he is a lamb, now, and couldn’t  _ truly  _ hurt her. Not for all the credits in the galaxy. 

She likes being with someone who has to choose, each day, to sit and turn his face up to the light. Even if he was dragged to this point over the coals of love and pettiness and saving his own skin from death at the hands of the First Order.

—

It works because when she pictures his heart she sees a rabbit. He is of the twitching nose, thrumming heart, the limbs poised to dash at an instant even in the dead of sleep, and when she pictures her own heart it is like a deep and dark forest that grows lush where even the light cannot see. She has so much love to give, in the wake of her family and the Resistance and everything else crumbling around her. 

When she looks at him her wild landscape heart sees that he is a clever little creature and sings  _ come home to me. Hide here. Come and live in this uncharted territory and make it your lively haven and rest in me.  _

— 

He says he loves her like bread loves dough or a bullet loves flesh or a dying cat loves a tight dark spot. All of these metaphors make her laugh, and she never forgets a single one. They bing around her skull at night when she cannot sleep and feels lonely and needs to think of being wanted. 

—

He says he loves her like a mad fever in his head, but then he goes and shows it by getting into her bed with warm kisses and citrus-scented hands full of gifts for her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [the model I based Hux's leg off of](https://leggies.tumblr.com/image/611636054887448576)
> 
> Thank you suh much for reading! We all love comments and I do too. <3 Lemme know if you like.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Are your fantasies so disturbing?” He asks over the rim of his tumbler, eyes squinting in absolute delight. “You can’t even speak.” 
> 
> 'They are', she has to resist biting back. 
> 
> (aka: The Porn Begins)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey hey! Last chapter was a bit of a beast, so if you need a recap: Rose got finger-banged the morning this smut takes place, and I went on a whole bunch about how they fell in love and work as married humans. (I'm planning on writing a prequel fic to this'un that elaborates more on that whole deal, because them finding their dynamic is life.) 
> 
> Otherwise, it's all rambling and you can read this chapter without finishing that one! 
> 
> There's a song they play in this chapter. It's Thai and gorgeous and I listen to it on a loop all the time. [Listen, if you're so inclined!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pvlyIRzCs4)

— — —

**_Present._ **

Behind two secured pneumatic doors, through the shop office, is the narrow, bending staircase that leads up to their living quarters. It’s lit badly, by just one bulb, and feels fundamentally at odds with Hux’s body type. 

Each step _also_ houses stacks of manuals and datapads and storage crates that don’t fit inside of their apartment, effectively halving the space in which one can put a foot down. He’s used to the space, though, to ducking his head under the doorways and folding himself against the wall when lugging up the grocery crate. Used to the routine of waiting at the top of the steps, as he does now, to ensure the bottom door is locked, before he opens the front door and walks inside. 

It’s cool already. She put the fans on, bless her. He can feel the air brushing his hair away from its sweaty cling to his forehead. The space already smells of dalu-flower too, but he cannot see Rose, only hears some knocking around from around the corner. She must be putting away the laundry. 

The apartment is circular in design, with high ceilings made of duraglass windows that open or close or cover themselves with bulletproof steel shutters at the touch of a button. The sun streams in all day, lighting the space so much as to make it feel double its actual size; Rose has hung potted houseplants from dozens of hooks in the window beams, too, so they drape their greenery overhead like a captive canopy. 

The walls of their large ‘fresher room carve out the center of the space. Arranged around it are the kitchen; the table that serves for a dining room and makeshift workspace; a living area with crowded shelves and ice-blue cushions on the floor, which they rearrange when watching Holodramas on the projector; and, opposite the door so as not to be visible when walking in, their bedroom. 

It’s small but, horror of horrors, _cozy._ He’s always arm’s length away from one surface or another, no matter where he is, which comes quite in handy if he ever needs to hop around one-legged. The general who was once afforded the luxury of clean, open space aboard each starship could not have tolerated this environment. 

Today’s Hux does his best to maintain a sense of order and has to leave the rest to the constant white noise of anxiety in his head. This is partially for survivals’ sake; he must take what shelter is offered to him, obviously, no matter its suitability to his senses. 

Maybe the tiny part of him that was the first to mutiny against the Order also enjoys this kind of chaotic environment. It’s very different from what he’s always known, the mismatched furniture and spare parts and half-finished projects all new objects in the landscape of his life. At least it all makes a maddening kind of sense; thanks to him, everything is clean and organized and nothing is ever dusty from sitting too long. 

Rose’s taste manifests in bright colors and living things; Hux’s, in cat statuettes and Imperial relics. What space isn’t taken up by the clutter of living is occupied by an object of one of those categories, meaning their apartment is essentially a multi-colored chaos den with the eyes of ceramic patterned cats staring out from most angles. 

This creates an unnerving effect for all but the two who call it home. 

Charlotte permits this decor, a remarkable blessing from a cat: she has a favorite perch in the kitchen and a hidey-hole under the bed. Otherwise, she only naps on the bed or mouses in the shop. Perhaps she inherited her air of refinement from her father.

The holiest of clutter-corners is located on a table right by the front door. It hosts a bowl, made of Haysian smelt, not too large, hammered by hand into dappled beauty — his wedding gift to her. Inside of it there’s a rotating cast of fruits and fringi cakes and books, little paper recreations of starships and bombers and a card with an exploding Death Star that says “ _wish you were here!”_. It rests on a red cloth embroidered with an elaborate floral pattern.

Next to the bowl rest some holodiscs that project images of Paige, extracted from Resistance archives, and a jar with the living dalu blooms already in water. Hux’s influences come from a little porcelain cat figure, who is painted dark blue with white Arkanian ichor-flowers to match the traditional embroidered cloth that everything sits on. The cat keeps guard over the miniature altar, he likes to think. 

As with the hedge outside, Hux doesn't claim the cat to hold anyone's place, but she reminds him of Milicent in the same reminiscent way that Charlotte — who flopped out of his arms the second they stepped inside — does. The textile and embroidery are for his mother, or at least suit what few details about her he has: the fact that she was apparently an incredible dresser for being a kitchen-woman, and that she grew the rows of poisonous ichor-flowers in the front lawn of the Hux estate for years without anyone becoming the wiser. 

(Killing his father with the venom of the Parnassos beetle had felt like a whisper of the coming into himself, the coming home, that finding Rose did.) 

He’s just got his shoes off when he hears Rose calling from around the corner — “Is that you or is there a murderer?” 

“Murderer,” he calls back drily, because she shouldn’t ask silly questions like that. 

His hands are already washed and teeth brushed, courtesy the shop bathroom below, so he needn’t bother with that. Hux decides not to hunt her down; she’ll come to him if he waits patiently enough. 

He gets to unpacking the grocery crate while everything is still cold and sure enough, she pops out a few minutes later, though he’s no cooler for not having gone to look for her. 

He should have. 

He would have found her close to the bed, and had the element of surprise on his side, and instinct would have taken over. 

Instead: this preening pretense drawing things out, keeping him at the same screeching level of unbearable horniness he’s been riding all day long. 

Alas. He set out to play it slow tonight, anyway, and does not like to contradict himself. It always ends up being worth it when they go slowly. 

She does not make it easy, however, when she puts together the most devastating of casual looks. Her hair’s up in two quick knots with the fringes hanging down so there’s hair for him to twist, and she chose to wear one of _his_ cream-colored turtleneck shirts, without a bra underneath because — she means to kill him? 

Her nipples are saying “ _hello!!”_ through the fabric which he knows is soft to the touch and which he also knows she’s stretching out irreparably. 

Certainly she meant to end his life. 

“Good _evening_ ,” he blurts out, feeling caught and awkward without anything smart to say to such a specimen. 

She’s in her Haysian-style pants too, the cut loose and baggy until caught at the cuffs. They’re made of silken red material that reaches up to the cinch of her waist, tying off there and a few inches above each ankle, too, with thin strips of fabric dyed gold. 

More scattered pieces of Hays Minor live on. Even these tiny bits feel important. 

“Hello yourself,” she chirps, too lightheartedly cheerful for the way she’s wrapped herself up for him. “Is that for me?” She tilts her head, eyeing the thing he’s been holding dumbly in his hand ever since she popped over. their glass decanter, refilled at the tavern with Corellian grain whiskey. 

He blinks. All of it is for her, whatever she’s pointing to. All of his everything is, she knows that. 

Some autonomous process (the same one responsible for keeping him alive in environments that were cutthroat by literal definition) moves his lips and makes him say “in a moment,” then he’s putting the container down on the kitchen counter. 

In turning away he has the chance to reassemble himself into the cool, collected person he typically presents so effortlessly. It is a Herculean effort, but one which he is far beyond used to accomplishing, and in half the time he’s got now.

When he rounds back she takes one look at the pained expression on his face and bursts out laughing, then smacks a hand over her mouth and shakes her head - _sorry sorry I don’t like to laugh at people but_ — 

“Damn, man. I’m sorry, is the shirt too much?” She fingers at the hem, “it’s the one with the hole in it, so I thought it’d be okay that I borrow it?” 

She’s gone and diffused the tension in her perfectly dense, destructive manner. Where he might once have, in his embarrassment, gone and been haughty and gotten himself thrown in the doghouse for his temper, Hux now shakes his head with a fond little smirk.

“Perfectly fine. I only worry that you’re ashamed of having such an… _impressionable_ husband.” He shakes his head at his own behavior. “A shame, that you insist on keeping me around.” 

She’s crossing the room to him and when she parks herself so they’re toe-to-toe, he smells her fresh fragrant skin immediately. She must have found the time to wash her body _and_ put away laundry, as part of her mysterious ability to accomplish much in no time at all. Or perhaps he’d simply lingered outside daydreaming for far longer than he thought.

Instead of immediately using her charms against him, she smiles sunnily up from this short distance. “Who would reach for things up high if you weren’t around?” 

“That is true. You _are…_ ” he regards her with a faux sneer. “Puny _.”_

“Yes. Call your wife ‘puny’. Keep that up.”

He’s back to smiling. She calls herself by _your wife,_ _his_ wife, the person who married him, for some reason. Who is his to have and squish and protect selfishly forever. 

“I’ll stop observing it… when it stops being true,” he leans in to murmur, at which opportunity she fists her hands in his shirt, pops up on her toes, and kisses him soundly. 

Like in the misty dark of the sail-speeder, her mouth fits to his expertly, eagerly, a little messily. But he needn’t let her go this time.

The way she lays her whole palm against his neck to hold him down, as if she too had just realized that they have luxurious time, is one of his favorite of her gestures. She reminds him of his speeding pulse and his inattention to even breathing and his bad posture. 

Brings him back down to earth. 

It’s also possessive; Rose does it much more pronouncedly in public than she does in private, where her touch is gentle but firm, and he encourages any and all behavior of that nature. 

“ _So_ sweet,” she whispers back, tapping the tip of his nose with a laugh. 

“I’ll keep you around, if…” her sentence trails off, her point evidently not arriving on her brain’s loading screen at the right time, like usual. 

“If you start the kettle for me.” 

“You are _truly_ out to undersell yourself today,” he tuts, shaking his head and waving away her offers of help with the last of the things to put away. She has no choice but to fall happily back in one of the worktable chairs and rest herself, which is what he prefers. 

She could settle into any number of menial tasks to fill the minutes until he’s done tidying and the kettle’s got a boiling pot of water ready. Check in on a source within the Kanjiklub, respond to messages about open repair tickets, sketch out a schedule for tomorrow — Rose does none of these. 

She never likes to spend spare pockets of time wisely. 

Rather, she’s trying to put on music. He _never_ used to put on a racket when there could be tranquil silence instead, but this too is a pleasant adaptation. The radio on the table makes garbled static noises as she fiddles with it, readjusting the stations to accommodate Iasus' solar rotation. 

When she lands on a channel, it’s her favorite oldie’s station, broadcast out of Mon Calamari. The songs are sung in high nasal registers. They’re scrubbed and poppy for standard daytime, tranquil and even for night, but always complex and rich-sounding and about love, in one way or another. 

The tune issuing now is by a woman who pitches down up and down, the percussive beat lush and easy to sway to should one not catch oneself in time. Rose sets it to play quiet so it doesn’t drown out any of their own noises, then hops out of her seat.

He turns his head a little, not hiding that he’s watching her shimmy her way over. 

Rose does not _dance_ so much as sway beautifully, her arms suspended open like a goddess of bounty, wrists rolling so her fingers flutter like feathers. However it feels best to move is how she dances. Her body pitches side to side by the syrupy rhythm of the song.

“You wanna have bloomflower tea with me?” She asks as she slides into the narrow space between his body and the counter.

This is done under the pretense of going into the cabinet with said tea and the mugs, but she’s only just gotten it open when he starts to sway along with her, getting her distracted. His larger body folds around her, his chin resting on top of her head, arms crossed around her waist. 

“Just the one cup will do.”

\--

He married a most excellent chin rest, he’s thinking. She could not be moving around more, between grabbing things and still half-dancing, but her head is low and stable enough that he maintains his hold on her easily anyhow. 

This physical contact is nowhere near what he’d _like_ to be making with her at the moment, but it’s quite enough to keep him at bay for the time being. 

“Just mine?” She’s got a single-serving box of the tea flowers pinched in her hand. The tiny dried buds unfurl their petals when dunked into boiling water, making a dramatic show each time. 

The resulting tea has an overly floral flavor, between chamomile and lavender, which never fails to hit Rose with a perfumey aftertaste on the first sip. She has _never_ liked the flavor, but insists on preparing them each a cup every time anyway. Hers is always destined to sit and get cold and grow forgotten until he’s annoyed enough to pick up the accumulated mugs on their workspace. 

“And just use _half_ the box, if you would be so kind…” He would rather sound wry, but the words come out sounding more on the beleaguered side, his mind more on the way her belly feels against his hands than on getting his tone quite right. 

Rose shakes her head, then drops half the packet’s worth of whole dried flowers into the empty glass teapot. 

\--

She hesitates over the other, deciding how this is going to go.

The decision, reached after a moment, is to follow his orders. She reasons that it’s only because he’s bound to put up a bigger fight than she’s willing to go against, and she hardly wants the tea anyway, just needed an excuse to stay in the kitchen and to get up in her husband’s business. 

That small mercy granted, she stands and sways with him, leaning against his heat. Another snatched moment of peace and tension perfectly balanced, the ache it creates in both of them a delicious reason to keep playing things out. 

“It’s not as good with just the half, isn’t it?” She asks, sounding a little coy just to be talking about tea.

“You’ve never finished a cup!” From a whine to a dry jab of a voice; he pulls his faces on and off like _that_ , truly. 

“Seven credits a packet for you to watch the _flowers bloom_.” 

“Nevermind the merits of small pleasures, _Armie,_ you never haggle with Old Tuo. I know for a fact you could get them for five, and _you_ know it too.” 

She cranes her head around to look at him, and catches him as he’s distracted, finishing his work putting things away. 

When Rose extends her arms to the chorus at the end of the love-song playing on the radio, he wraps his hands around hers and she makes them move prettily, as he would never do, wrists turning slow elegant circles. 

“I find haggling with that old man to be rather…” He grimaces, tucking his chin down so he can find her eyes and impress his intent. “Ghoulish, don’t you think?”

Rose smiles, knowing it’s because Old Man Tuo is the kind of salesman who looks more like a shriveled fruit in old clothes than a man, and can’t hear without a bugle-looking device he puts up to his drooping ear. He doesn’t sell many of his delicate imported teas on this rough tidal pool of a planet, and deep inside Hux feels bad enough for him not to try and take his usual twenty percent off the top. Also, he doesn’t want to lose his only source of worthwhile tea without having to import it himself.

Rose loses her straight face shortly. 

“I mean, yeah _._ I don’t know why General Hux isn’t better known for his _empathy_ for the old and feeble.” 

\--

Hearing himself referred to by that name never fails to rouse something in Hux; it’s something that’s heated but has no particular intent of its own, so by turns it gets him aroused and nostalgic and wary. 

The kettle clicks off, indicating that it’s done boiling the water. This is good, because Rose can grab for it and have a weapon in her hand, which deters Hux in his temptation to pinch into her ticklish sides and make her jump and squeal in surprise. 

“You’ve such _nerve_ tonight, dear one.” 

He observes evenly instead, hoping she feels some kind of threat in his letting her know he’s noticing her behavior, her unusually sharp tongue. 

If she does, she doesn’t show it, just gives him a short hot look and then digs her heels into her obstinacy. 

Hux realizes then, and only then, that she intends to build his case against her for later punishment. The realization comes and hits him right in the stomach and bursts like a confetti bomb; it makes him feel very stupid and slow and somehow that much more excited about the upcoming night.

The result of this realization is that _he_ blushes, which is the opposite of what he wanted to happen. 

Luckily, his cheek is pressed to the top of her head, so she can’t tell and start kissing at him for being so “cute” and “pink”, one of her more heinous habits. 

“Move, big boy,” Rose commands, obviously in a different sort of mood entirely, pushing him back with her shoulder. 

Momentarily cowed, pleased by the nickname, he does as she did before: falls back into a chair, lounging back with his knees parted to take up an obnoxious amount of space in the small kitchen, as is his way when flustered. A hand floats up to support his chin as he watches her rush to prepare a miniature ceremony for the pouring of the tea, calming himself again. 

The glass teapot goes on the table between them, and Rose sweeps over with the kettle in hand, pouring the water over the half-pack’s worth of flowers with a flourish. 

Hux watches the show with much less interest than his wife, who puts down the kettle and immediately plants her palms on the table and flattens her upper body against it, so as to achieve the best angle to watch the unfurling of the mummified petals. 

Once she’s engrossed, he watches her with his keen eye instead. 

It’s over in seconds, but the way she lights up over something so silly is worth the credits. That’s why he keeps buying the blasted things; so they’ll bloom and then be wasted, all for her bright-as-the-sun, dorky-in-its-sincerity smile. 

She turns to grab the mug, selecting for him the one that says “DON’T TALK TO ME UNTIL I’VE HAD MY CAF” emblazoned on it. Pours the tea, not a drop spilled, and blows on the surface of the liquid for a long minute before taking a loud sip.

Her face wrinkles, like it always does, as if she expected this cup to be different. Maybe the one where she’ll finally have acquired good taste? Apparently today isn’t the blessed day for that. Hux takes hold of the warmed handle when she shoves the mug over this way, and tries not to smirk too loudly in his rightness. 

Having still not sat down, Rose grabs the flagon of whiskey from the counter, hips moving along to the similarly sedate beat of the next song playing on the radio. She eyes the amber liquid with the same interest she just had for the tea, that boring stuff now long since forgotten, as is _her_ way. 

“What’s this, again?” 

“Corellian buckgrain whiskey. Top shelf, or so I was told.” Hux doesn’t trust saloon-keepers for anything in the Galaxy. They know too much — _and_ are never quite honest about their booze. 

“I want.” 

“Then pour some.”

She wiggles her eyebrows at him. Hux is a creature of precision and order and habit, easily appealed to on all of those fronts.

“You really trust _me_ to pour it properly, Armie?” 

“Perhaps I shouldn’t, if it’s to be this much of a _production_ , every time…” 

But he’s already back on his feet and moving to the cupboard for the short tumblers, because she _does_ have a point. He likes things done perfectly, and that tends to mean having to do them himself. Plus, pouring good liquor is one of the few pleasures left to Hux from his days as an Officer, and he relishes it. 

Not missing a beat, Rose hands him the flagon, their fingertips touching in the exchange, and gives him one of her tight, semi-earthside smiles. She’s on her toes, too, is playing her own game of strategy. 

He wishes they’d reach the conclusion of each now and be done with it, not bother with this iteration of their eternal power struggle. 

He’d like to pin her down and use her as his personal fucktoy, quite frankly, and knows by the obscene heat that’s rolling off her that she would too. 

It’s merely a matter of getting there; it can’t be too long now. _Cannot,_ or he’ll rip off that doomed sweater himself. The whiskey can only help. 

Hux pours two fingers’ worth for each of them, the eye-watering alcoholic scent issuing immediately off the surface of the liquid. 

Rose accepts her glass, only stopping herself from immediately taking a swig when he offers his to toast, first. 

Tradition. The closest thing he has to a superstition. 

“To bot farms!” Rose salutes, which he echoes dryly, and they both drink— Rose swigging down half her glass, Hux taking only a small tasting sip. To see her glug it down like that is like a physical pain, one he is made to feel many times a day by her decidedly wrong way of doing so many things. 

“You know, darling, there are _notes_ to whiskey,” he drawls, eyebrow quirking. “You could stop and appreciate them.” 

“I know I could,” she says, all saccharine, her eyes now off a hundred light-years away, dreaming of something else. 

Not really bothering to take the bait on this one, oddly. 

If she isn’t whipping about spouting new ideas and changing plans every two minutes, she’s suspended in midair, up to her eyebrows in a far-away world. 

For someone with feet planted so firmly on the ground as Hux, it should be vexing; rather, he finds that she encourages the shy side of him that clings to hopeful ideas of the future, and he snaps her back to the real world whenever she needs. 

“When are we hearing back from those bots, anyway?” She asks, out of this nowhere from which she’s returned. 

When she turns to him, her eyes are big and round, as if she’s begging for something she _wants._

“It’s been forever.” 

What’s she’s really doing, for whatever reason, is begging him to dive into a way-too-long explanation of the project he’s conducting. It boils down to the running of countless simulations, with a gaggle of mercenary supercomputers’ help. 

(As part of his “stealing from the rich'' obligation, Hux has been lately attempting to figure out which method the black market cyber-currency banks use when assigning passcodes to their users. If he can stumble into a method to unscramble the encrypted codes, so will come easier access into the holdings of many of their targets.)

“It’s only been a week. But perhaps only another week or two yet. I intend to be thorough.” 

He doesn’t know what she’s playing at, but he won’t be made fun of. Not without just a bit more provocation, some more stroking of his ego. 

“You think they’ll get something?” 

Her insistence on pushing away innuendo or nuance is admirable, if yet infuriating. But he’s always glad to discuss his projects with anyone who will listen… 

It’s been a long road; Hux, truthfully, has little faith in the bot-brains he’s paying to test millions of passcodes daily. He’s on another theory now, but it feels too crackpot to dive into quite yet. 

They’re sat in chairs pulled out from the table so they might face each other, far enough away that there’s no easy physical contact, but close enough that it’s tempting to reach out for it. Neither does, just leans back and postures for the other. Both of them saying _I’m in control, here,_ but both of them also desperately wanting Rose on his lap and doing nothing about it. 

“I certainly hope they do, or else I’ve wasted our money and I’ll have to go and get it back.” 

He swirls his glass, pointedly looking into it instead of at her or chest, refusing to take in the shape of her breasts and their peaks that dart through his thin sweater. 

The mere thought of them makes his mouth twitch, and he won’t cede _any_ ground now that they’re approaching this in earnest. 

“Which model are you having them test out?” 

Rose is never this interested in the mathematical workings of his projects, her expertise more aligned with actual engine-work, not the ins and outs of programming. She seems interested enough, her glass still in hand but untouched since she shot half. 

Her eyes are soft around the edges, and sparkling as they take in all of his sulking, suspicious glory.

Never getting to talk about it and always desperate to do so, Hux surrenders, despite his misgivings about her motivations— whether she’ll actually _listen_ or not. 

Wearily, he uses an idle datapad to sketch out an example of the equation he’s been stuck on. 

His eyes constantly shift between her and the screen, suspicious at first of her motives, then greedy for the shape she makes as she bends towards him. He’s able to prattle on with even a quarter of his mind on the math, that’s no problem, he can exert the control necessary for that in his _sleep._

Her fringe brushes against the roll of her shoulder, the line of her neck to arm and down below to pinch at her waist, the single soft roll that forms there when she sits — perfection. 

Even when tucked beneath the rubbish shirt with which he covers his own filthy form. 

— 

_Boyish._ That’s the word. It doesn’t apply to much of the rest of him, physically or personality-wise: Armitage always seemed to her like he came out of his _amma_ speaking full sentences and ready to tear apart the universe, and he carries himself with an inherent sternness that only breaks when control is torn from him (which only happens to be _very frequently_ ). 

But ‘boyish’ describes the quality of his voice to a _tee._

There’s no deep chest husk to it, just a light intonation that seems to come from his head more than anything. 

He has a supernatural talent of control over it, his massive lungs giving him the capability of speaking to an arena in the same breath as he whispers in her ear, and for the longest time he used that control to sound harsh and authoritative.

Now that it’s been four years since he was the General, and had the General’s Voice, his words don’t punch with _quite_ the same fervor. They’ve rounded out and softened and loosened up with emotion a fair bit, but his accent remains crisp and eloquent nevertheless. 

His voice is always quirking up with impishness or down with gravity from the evenness that pervades it, which gives him a soothing quality of speech even when he’s discussing plans to break into a smuggler’s lair or whispering about how he’s going to wreck her as he plies her open with his fingers. 

All she has to do is get him talking about something he’s interested in, and she’s set for however long she chooses to hear him speak. 

Rose couldn’t give a porg’s tailfeather about this equation, truly, though she _is_ making more of an effort to understand the complex beauty to the way they work. 

She’s just happy to zone in on the way he’s walking her through each step, letting her express her understanding with the faintest of indications. 

He’s a good teacher, really, which is an odd thing to know about him but a thing which she has always very much admired. It just happens that Rose is far better suited to being given a datamanual and told to figure things out herself. 

Their glasses temporarily forgotten, he writes each numerical phrase on the datapad, over which they each bend over from their opposing sides. 

As long as Rose keeps her eyes down on the pad, watching his fingers as he writes, he won’t be able to tell that she’s not paying attention. That each word of his, dry as hell in content, is still shooting straight between her thighs, to spark out through her lower half as if a physical caress. 

She’s uncomfortably wet already (had thought _please just take it_ when he’d been holding her from behind, earlier), which makes her glad she went with a slightly less whimsical pair of panties than she did her bra. 

Still, they’re going to soak through by the time he gets to them, and he’s going to gloat about it, and just the thought of that makes her want to show him and his perfect pale skin who’s the one with the real right to flaunt their power, and — 

— _phew_. 

_In time, Rosie._

The power of the image knocks her out of reality for a second, and when she snaps back, he’s stopped speaking. Switched the radio off, too, so it’s silent-silent. Probably has been for several long seconds now, with her lagging loading time. 

He’s abandoned the datapad as soundly as the glass of whiskey. 

“Hmm?” Rose hums gracelessly, looking sheepishly up to find that she’s mere moments from being pounced upon, judging by the coldly determined edge in his face and the way he’s begun to drag his chair over to get closer to her. 

But that’s _not_ how this is supposed to go — this, she remembers, luckily with more time than she did the sail-speeder’s autopilot. 

—

He stops once he’s just close enough to lean in and poke her forehead, no malice in his look but a trace in his heart. It needs a healthy outlet; the smoke was a bandaid. 

“I _said,_ bantha-brains, that if you just want to hear me drone on to admire my accent, I’ve _plenty_ of Imperial history to regale you.” 

She wants him, he knows it, she’s just distracting herself with his voice now, is ripe for the taking— is _his,_ whenever he should choose to have her. 

Which is now. To Hell with waiting. He’ll give her the performance she’s begging for, exactly what she wants, exactly what she needs, and his heart rate picks up with this internal declaration of war. 

(This freedom, to wait or not, kiss or not, touch or not, fuck or not — among the many others afforded him by the shackles of love and marriage — makes the inherent precarity of their lives worth the constant fear and vigilance.)

“Ew,” she’s saying, “I’m surprised those old books still _open_.” 

Her face twists into a mask of disgust but she chooses to keep him at a distance by the sweetest of methods, hooking her arms over the back of her chair to give her the leverage necessary to plant her foot against his chest and push him away. 

“All that jizz in the pages.” 

(This will _always_ be worth it.) 

  
  


—

He’s absolutely useless once he’s got her foot in his hand. 

This is one of his many constants, something she relies upon when devising strategies for tight situations such as this. 

Rose wants things to start out a certain way, at least, and they can play out however they may, that’s up to him, but: she’ll be a control freak, just at the beginning. 

Having gotten him back a bit, she relents the pressure of the ball of her foot against his chest, and allows him to take hold of his prized appendage. 

He’s rubbing over her arch with his thumbs, the level of concentration he’s dedicated to the task right at the level he displays when rewiring an ion core attachment that’s liable to blow. He looks very solemn too, like something is bothering him, which she chalks up to Hux being Hux when suddenly — 

She’s tugged forward in her seat, slightly, because he raises her leg up so he might kiss worshipfully at the tops of her toes. They’re tipped in dark polish, which she gleefully forces him to maintain for her, the strain of bending over to do so herself too much of an inconvenience to bother otherwise.

He means to keep traveling up her leg — she can see through his seriousness that he’s just as desperate for her now, which feels as much like the swig of whiskey in its effects on her body — and then probably up her leg and then land wherever he may, but that won’t do. 

In order to regain ground, she plants her other foot on his chest and scoots back like she did before, yanking her other foot away before he can get anything in his mouth and start biting. 

He gives her an extremely sour, pinched look, never one to tolerate having his toys taken away. It says _this better be good_ and also reassures her he’s going to be plenty inspired for the proposition she’s about to make. 

She wants to step on that face whenever he makes it, but the usual instinct she has for dominance now feels quieted, shut up in a mental closet for one blessed night. He’s going to take care of her. 

“I have your surprise now,” Rose announces, covering for the fact that she feels suddenly terrified, mouth drying out at the prospect of his having a negative reaction to whatever memories might be attached to the simple image of a new pair of First Order gloves. 

“Oh?” 

His brows do raise, but he seems more concerned with getting her foot back than discovering what it is she’s got for her. 

“Is it… you? Is that the big surprise?” 

His disbelief in her has a ring to it that bruises her feelings the tiniest bit, but it does so only because he’s not wrong. It’s very like her to tease a gift all day, only for the gift to be herself, all wound up and ready to sit on his face first thing. 

“ _No,_ thank you very much,” she sniffs, deigning to use the foot removed from his grasp to, with her pointed toe, trace around his lap, becoming very pleased at what she finds there. So far, so good. 

She stays in that arms-shoved-back pose, which is really to say that she’s sticking her chest out as far as comfortably possible, and glowers at him, trying to stay calm and in control. 

This is both so he can fully admire the tits she has to haul around all day, and so she gains the affect of someone with authority, who lounges back and produces things of great value to bestow upon her beloved servant. 

The fear of his disapproval remains, but instead of caging her in it fuels deliciously the thrum of her heart -- which feels like it’s going to fall through her stomach and out of her ass at any time. 

Careful to maintain the pose, her wandering foot now planted along the length of his inner thigh, Rose manages to reach into the waistband on her left hip without falling over or losing composure. 

She presents the gloves, biting her lip to keep from laughing away the tension. The leather is already warmed by being tucked so close to her body, held in place by the tight waist cord. 

For a moment, he merely looks at them. Head actually cocking to the side, like a dog. 

Curious. Trying to figure out what, in fact, they might _be._

He’s caught in disbelief for a second longer, his usually pink complexion heating up to a near-red. 

Then, he seems to remember himself. He takes the gift offered with a reverence countered only by the speed with which he snatches them away. No insult or injury to his spirit, apparently, so she’d worried for nothing.

“You _cannot_ be serious,” he says, wonder bubbling through as he inspects the gloves for evidence of their being counterfeit, a clever forgery. 

(Rose hadn’t thought of the possibility of a replica, just had the instinct to be touched by hands encased in warm leather, and ran with it.)

“ _Truly?_ How did you find these?” He sounds as if he’s going to bust up laughing with the incredulity of it, inspecting the gloves just like she did earlier that night. 

He’s just about shooting off sparks with the excitement of it. And his thrill at receiving a gift. 

Rose _,_ for her part, is herself practically vibrating with the pressure of containing all of her nerves and fear and excitement and keenness to climb atop him. 

“Luck and talent,” is all she says, the words catching so as to come out as a throaty little whisper. A quick hike of her chin makes it seem as if that were just another character choice. 

She re-positions herself, retracting her legs off him to plant on the ground, just as open a pose as he struck when sitting too. 

There’s too much inside for the skin she has outside, and she’s feeling hot all of a sudden, despite the shower she just took. 

Hux holds the pair in one hand and leans forward at Rose, elbows on his knees, brows raised and expression animated. 

She likes the way his eyes haven’t changed, the look in them something she’d describe as a cold fire. Burns, but not with heat. With ice. 

“And what, pray tell, am I to do with these relics? Hm?” He’s smiling now. And not in a scary way, but the way that’s fond and curious and very pleased. So, still a smirk, but a nice one. 

It reminds her that it’s been so many minutes since she kissed him it might as well be hours which might as well be an entire lifetime. 

“Set them aside as the cherished objects they are?” He tilts his head again. “Or — perhaps, use them —” 

Rose crosses her arms over her chest. Her tongue darts out to lick at her plump, dry lower lip. 

This tiny gesture catches his attention back immediately. His expression drops from its lighthearted set to one engrossed, very focused. 

“What do _you_ want to do with them, Armie?” 

He gives a noise like _hah_ and, as if the question itself is permission, pops the stitch holding the gloves together in a way he must have done countless times in his life. 

_That doesn’t turn you on,_ Rose reminds herself, _that’s not hot, that’s messed up. What he did in them…_

“I suppose you intend I use them. That I touch you with them?” 

(… _What he’s_ going _to do in them … )_

“Yeah.” Her whole throat feels tight, but the need for the last of her dose of liquid courage is too great. 

Why is this such a big deal? She _never_ has a problem asking for what she wants, even if it’s to watch him sit on her strap. If he weren’t burning a hole into her with those seafoam eyes, holding tangible evidence of how terrible he used to be…

She sucks her lips in (and would be devastated to know she’s picked this habit up from Hux’s trademark grimace) and shoots the last of her drink. 

His eyebrows shoot up; he looks about to bust out laughing again. But he seems to find the idea agreeable because he has a drink, too, though nowhere near to the bottom of the glass like Rose. 

“Are your fantasies so disturbing?” He asks over the rim of his tumbler, eyes squinting in absolute delight. “You can’t even speak.” 

_They are,_ she has to resist biting back. 

“Spit it out, little rebel,” he continues, settling into his smugness like a king into his royal robes. 

He’s so very smart, when he wants to be.

Rose has to work to meet his eye like she did to take a drink, but when she does, it yields the same jolt of excitement. 

Her anxiety begins to morph into something entirely different. Fear dissolves like candy floss in water, forms a singing clear elixir that makes her feel very strong. She could do anything, now, inflict anything, take anything. 

When she speaks, her voice is steady and confident and true.

“I want you to be the General when you fuck me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rose's backstory is somewhat comics-based and then fleshed out by me. Again, no intention to align to any one culture. 
> 
> [The song they're listening to](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pvlyIRzCs4)
> 
> ["Bloomflower" tea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrNPwytgLHc)
> 
> Author lives on comments and will be responding to all of your lovely ones so far very soon. 
> 
> I love and appreciate all of you who are reading my too-many-words-before-the-porn story. <3 <3


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